Anniversary gift re-purposed

For our 5th anniversary, Bonnie surprised us with a huge poster full of pictures of Dave and I since the beginning of our relationship!  It is so cool and I'm sad that I don't have the wall space to display it as-is.  So I changed it up a bit - the sentiment is still there, but now I can find an appropriate place to store it with our other pictures :)

I previously shared that I wanted to re-purpose it as a photo album with 5's (5th anniversary gift...get it?)  stenciled all over the front and back covers...kinda like I blinged out an inspiration notebook I made back in the 90's for future home ideas and things that made me happy.  I got started on this project while we were at the beach a few weeks ago...yep, I didn't have time to step foot on the beach, but I did have time to do this.  It was midnight, it was rainy, so we were stuck inside...excuses, excuses.

All I needed was an 8x8 scrapbook, paper, some canvas paint, stencil brushes, and some 5 stencils from my craft arsenal.

I used styrofoam cups for the paint - 1 for the paint itself, and 1 for dabbing the excess paint off the brush before stenciling:

Then I got to decorating...

That's where the project ended for the weekend.  i remembered to bring many sheets of scrapbooking paper in various brown shades and patterns, but I forgot my paper cutter so I couldn't trim them to the size I needed.  Bummer.

Fast forward to today...after I did some serious organizing in my craft closet, which I'll share in a later post, I felt motivated to work on a project.  I trimmed all my paper and then put all the pictures from the poster in chronological order.  That sounds easy, but it seems that 2004-2008 is all a big blur to me!  Luckily I have a ton of pictures from those trips on my computer so I could double-check the dates for some of them :)  I culd have sworn one of the trips was before the wedding, but turns out it was the following year!  Haha - 32's a little old to be having that kind of memory issue, but oh well.

On the first page, I displayed a portion of the poster Bonnie made.  This way we're not losing any part of her gift!

Once they were in order I mounted them on the pages, including a date and description of where the picture was taken...so I won't forget anymore :)  Here are some of the pages:

The finishing touch was filling the photo opening on the cover.  Had I remembered it was there I would have saved one of the photos...but I didn't.  So I improvised, and just stated the obvious:

Now the album has a home with all of our other photo albums in the study...and I can check one project off my to-finish-before-I-start-school-and-have-no-free-time list.  

There are only 4,326 more to go!  :)