Today we welcome Sylvie Hoobanoff as our guest blogger, who will share some fabulous graduation layouts she has completed for her daughter.

Hi there! My name is Sylvie Hoobanoff and I’m very happy to share a project I’ve been working on with you today. I live in beautiful Canal Flats, BC with my husband of 25 years. This fall we became empty nesters when our 18 year old daughter, Julia, went away to college and our 17 year old son, Nick, went away to play Junior B hockey. Now that my car pooling days are over, I am hoping to find more time for my passion of paper crafting and scrapbooking.

My daughter graduated high school in June 2014. After the two day event, I had over 100 photos to scrapbook! There were professional photos, personal photos that I took and even some I borrowed from my daughter’s friends from Facebook. Knowing that I couldn’t possibly scrap them all in regular pages, I decided to pick my favourite photos to scrap in the regular 12×12 format and use pocket pages to scrap the rest.

I started “Julia’s Graduation Extravaganza” project with the professional grad photos. Professional photos can be intimidating to scrapbook, so I thought I should start with those first and get them out of the way.

After a few regular scrapbook pages, I added the pocket pages. These came together quickly and I love how many photos I was able to scrapbook.

The one negative of using pocket pages with photos I have already printed is trying to make all the photos fit in the openings available Usually it’s a 4×6 photo but all I have left are 3×4 openings available. I just take a deep breath and cut the photo in half to make it fit into two pockets. I can’t always cut the photo in half, but I look for a spot of empty space where I can make the cut.

For example, the middle photo on the far left of the grad parade. I didn’t want to cut anyone out, but there was a space between the couples, so I just made the cut there. Then I placed the photo on a mat on the left side to fill in the space. Once the page is completed, the gap in the middle of the photo sort of disappears.

Now that most of the photos are in the pocket pages and the story is told, I started scrapping the rest of my favourite photos on 12×12 pages, again.

Using pocket pages is a great tool to use if you have a big story to tell with lots of photos. I’ve used this technique on travel pages, weddings and now a high school graduation.

Thank you so much Sylvie for showing us how to get those grad pics scrapped!

For more inspiration and scrapbooking ideas, please visit Sylvie’s blog “My Life in Pages” www.sylviehoobanoff.blogspot.ca