A note to my little graduate…

In June, we got to attend Liam’s Preschool “graduation” (there were actually 2 of them, this was the second one). It. was. awesome! Seriously! They did a big musical performance with props and routines for all their songs…my favourite was “Let It Go”, from Frozen. And it became very clear that this boy is not really into the whole “performing in front of an audience”, in the traditional sense. We watched as he inched forward ever so slowly from the front row until he was far enough from the group to run to us during the middle of the performance. I laughed so hard, I had tears in my eyes! We had to bribe him with the promise of cake if he went back to finish singing with his classmates. He was silly, and goofy, and perfectly happy just being himself.

A few days later, a friend from highschool shared a link to a video of Jim Carrey making a commencement speech on Facebook.

And man was it good!!! Like, profoundly good. It made me wonder, if I had heard those words earlier in my life, would I have chosen this same path? Who knows! But this message is definitely one that I want to share with my kids when they’re making decisions about their own paths one day.

And that is how this scrapbook layout was born… This layout was actually in the works for a veeeerrry long time. I just couldn’t settle on a way to design/embellish it. Then Ali Edwards released the “Be Brave” digital stamps, and everything clicked! I used a digital template from Studio Calico’s Pen and Paper class, which really helped keep the focus on the words while featuring a favourite photo. I kept the embellishments super simple with a few pieces of wood veneer from Studio Calico (here), acrylic stars (from this kit), and a strip of patterned paper (from this kit). I added some digital word art from Ali’s Prompt stamps to the photo and built the title with the hand written “be brave” stamp. The other fonts in the title are “Impact Label” and “Traveling Typewriter” (and they’re free from dafont.com).

The journaling is pretty much directly from Jim Carrey’s speech… because they are perfect. And there’s a little note from me to Liam at the beginning.