This book is a wonderful treasure. With it, children can easily create a special keepsake that celebrates their own lives—their families, friends, pets, school, and so forth. My Fabulous Life in Pictures is not just a scrapbooking instruction book, it is the scrapbook. Its 40 acid-free pages are filled with unique and creative ideas and starters. The album is spiralbound and very solid—as it should be, because it is meant to last.
The book provides the backgrounds and templates for kids to cut and paste their photos, magazine cuttings, and various memorabilia (such as ticket stubs, postcards, and so forth). The best part is that the pages are creative and fun. For example, the family tree spread features a tree backdrop with spaces for both leaf-shaped and acorn-shaped photos (the latter for the "nuts" of the family!). Templates for cutting photos in these and other shapes are provided in the envelope attached to the inside back of the book.
Humourous backdrops and frames include an award frame for frowners that reads "I Won't Smile Marathon" and a Bad Hair Cut Hall of Fame certificate. There are pages for making collages, a Best Friends spread, places to document travels and spots to glue souvenirs and postcards. One spread is entitled, "My Room", and kids are encouraged to add stickers (a sheet of stickers is included in the book), designs, photos, and magazine clippings to fill the room's bulletin board, door, and so on. Some bound-in envelopes are included, one for extra souvenirs like ticket stubs and candy wrappers, and another for creating a time capsule.
Besides a multitude of creative frames for photos, kids can also fill out questionnaires identifying favorite and "nastiest" foods, personality traits, favorite quotes, "my signature written with my eyes closed", least favorite commercial, and more.
While creating a scrapbook might seem a little daunting to some, this book makes it easy and fun to get started. Children as young as 9 will enjoy the book, but it is probably best for adolescents.
