Scrapbooking your hobbies: a Pokemon Go mini-album

Confessions: Last summer my family, like many others, started playing Pokemon Go. We played as a family for almost a year, and my husband and I still play. Every time we went to different places to walk around and catch 'em all, I'd take a picture, usually a family selfie. Even though my boys don't play anymore, I wanted to make a mini album to record this hobby from the past year. Here's what I did:

Since Pokeballs are a big part of the game, and they are round, I wanted a round album. I had no mini-albums that were plain circles, but I thought this scalloped mini-album from October Afternoon would suffice.

I knew circles and Pokeballs would be a part of my design, but I didn't want to be too literal, so I found some patterned paper and paint that could suggest Pokeballs and their colors and shapes. If you know the game, you can see the red that is the ball, plus the line and dot in the middle, plus the black, all of which suggests the ball.

To complete this project, I went through my buttons, die cuts, and stickers, pulling the red ones that I thought I could use. on this project. I then used circle punches on the patterned paper to make the inside pages. Here's the album:

This was sort of the cover page. Remember the red balls in front of Target? During the Pokemon craze, they painted the balls to look like Pokeballs. I took a picture of the boys last year and used it here.

This design would be the template for each page: a couple circles of patterned paper behind the photo, then some hand journaling. Here's the rest of the pages:

Each of these is a two-page spread. The title and journaling would be on one page and the photo on the other. After I adhered everything, I went back and embellished. I chose a small, simple lettering stamp set to stamp the title on each page, which I did right after I'd adhered everything.

NOTE: I messed up this first title. I knew it was Lake Harriet but for some reason I stamped Calhoun, which is the next photo. And this is why I added the blue strip and the tag.

When the title had the circles to the right like on this spread, I stamped from right to left to make sure there was enough space.

For longer titles, I had to be flexible and creative. Abbreviations and hyphenation ensued.

I only did two places twice, very practically to fill the whole album, so I used my two favorite Pokemon locations.

That embellishment cluster on the photo exists because I dropped ANOTHER photo backed with adhesive on it. I convered the adhesive with the cluster. Gah.

And to finish the album, I wrote about what we do with Pokemon today.

Thank you for letting me share this geeky passion and how I commemorated it! Tell me, do you scrapbook your hobbies? And do you play Pokemon?

Come at me, Slowbro: Scrapbooking your hobbies

It's been a busy fall again, but I have been scrapboooking. I've also gone back to some other hobbies this year that I've neglected: I finished three cross-stitch projects, I have read 34 books this year, and I grew an embarrassment of tomatoes. But I've slowly started scrapping again, and this time about a new hobby: Pokemon Go.

I know, I know--it's the game that everyone did, especially kids, then quit. Not my family. We've really enjoyed getting out and visiting different places in the Twin Cities, enjoyed the exercise, and managed some friendly competition and cooperation. I made a few pages recently, one about our trip to the zoo, and I plan on making a mini-album of the different places we've been. Here's a couple layouts I've made recently, starting with my favorite:

A month or so back, the game allowed you to choose a Pokemon as a "buddy" that you could walk around with to earn candies to power him up--something I guess candy does to us all (heh). I picked my Snorlax since he's rare and I can probably never catch another to earn more candy. When I saw how big he was next to my avatar, I immediately thought "Come at me, Bro!" then transposed it to "Slowbro," a kind of Pokemon. I took a picture and made this page.

The nice thing about Pokemon from a design standpoint are the colors--they are so bright and primary that it is easy to design with.

This next page is about my husband and me and how much we like to go hunting Pokemon together (apologies for the fuzzy resolution. It's getting dark so early here. I need to invest some time into making a light box.):

I tend to call these Pokedates but was hesitant to use it as the title because to me it sounds kind of naughty. Still, my husband challenged me, so I did. I put the accent on the E like it appears in the game, and bonus! I learned how to create the accented E in my journaling. Still don't know how to do it in Blogger, but oh well.

Again, I used bright primary colors, plus some pink for the Clefable I put in the gym. The red button is supposed to be a Pokeball, of course.

Thank you for letting my share this geeky hobby I've been indulging in! I hope this inspires you to create some pages about what else occupies your time, aside from scrapbooking.