Tyler, my middle son, is graduating this year – in about a week actually.  He has been in the high school band for all four years and each year the Band Boosters give the seniors a gift.  I suggested that we give them photo books for their senior gifts and the committee agreed.  We spent the next few weeks gathering pictures of all the band seniors – we had 20 this year.  For the past couple of months I have been working on their books using My Digital Studio.

I started by creating a book for Tyler – I designed all the pages – creating pages for each of their four years of high school.  I used a combination of individual and group/full band photos.  Luckily we have had other band parents taking photographs each year and the band has a website where we have many of them loaded.  Then to make the rest of the books I started with Tyler’s completed book and then did SAVE AS (important to remember this part before you make all your changes or you’ll lose the original – ask me how I know).  I saved a copy with the next students name and then switched out the pictures of Tyler for that student.  In some cases where I didn’t have as many pictures – I added in other group or section photos or made changes to some of the layouts.  As long as I had pictures I was good.  I had a few students that needed a bit more editing – one that wasn’t there during the freshman year – so I deleted those pages and added pages in other places, two that were Color Guard so they didn’t have concert season photos, and one that wasn’t in marching band for the senior year (and that was the biggest section of the book).

I was excited that Stampin’ Up! was having the sale this month on print products – I was able to print all 20 books at 30% off!  I ordered on the 1st so they would be here in time for the banquet which was this week.  I showed the band booster committee a few days early and they were so excited.  We presented the kids their books at the banquet and they loved them – the band director played a special good-bye song for them and I felt bad because I don’t think they were even paying attention to the song because they were looking at their books and at each other’s books.  I hope they will be cherished memories for them – if not the mom’s will love them!

Here are a few pages from Tyler’s book – and the matching tag that I made to go on them after I wrapped them up – I used the new swatchbook option for the tags.

For each book the first page was their Senior Night Photo with their parents.  I listed their name, the instruments they played during their four years, leadership positions, and special honors.  While Tyler didn’t actually play flute at any time in the band, he participated in a student led Flute Choir last year and they played as part of the concert that year.

This page was from their senior year and Tyler played a solo at the beginning of their show.  He was also the brass captain so the lower photo is all the leadership at one of their competitions.

This is the back cover of the book.  I wasn’t originally sure what to do with the back but I when I saw these photos that some one took from the back of all the students marching in formation to the football field.  And I thought the quote from the Word Play stamp set was perfect for this – and coincidentally was the same quote they used on the banquet program too.

And here is that tag – you can see it matches the page from the Senior year I posted above.

This is a page from the swatch book and I just exported them to .jpeg and printed them at home on my computer.

I think I have rambled on enough today.  Have a good one!