Week 52

A year in review

Welcome to week fifty-two of your Smash Book. Hooray, we made it to the final week! Give yourself a big pat on the back for sticking through a whole year of memory keeping. For our final assignment we are going to take some time to reflect on the past 12 months of our lives, and write down some highlights from each month.

Make a List

Divide a scrap piece of paper into twelve sections, and give each one a heading with all the months of the year (January, February, etc). Look back at your calendar or camera roll to remember things you’ve done over the course of the year that really stood out to you as a memorable time.

Print the Templates + Bind the Booklet

Once you have all your highlights from the year written down, you can get to work on creating a mini Smash Book zine to capture your memories. Use the printable template pages to create your book. To bind the pages I stitched on the seams with a needle and thread.

For instructions on how to stitch a booklet together, refer to our Smash Book Kit video at the bottom of this page. If you don’t own a book cradle and awl, you can still mark and poke the holes along the seams using a large needle or push pin. Poke into a thick piece of cardboard to protect your table top.

Don’t forget to use our Pocket Template to keep your finished zine safely tucked away in your Smash Book.

Make the Captions

For the written captions, I used my Canva account to type up the words for each memory using a typewriter font and sized them to fit the pages I am using. I then printed them out and cut and paste them into my book. Click here to use the same template I used. You will need a Canva account to access.

Make the Pictures

Use any media you wish to represent your year. In my example, first I pasted my printed captions onto the page, leaving space around them to create my drawings in pencil. Then I inked those lines with a think black marker and erased my pencil lines. To give the drawings some colour, I used a set of watercolour pencil crayons.

Other ideas for your zine could be making a collage, or painting something abstract to represent each memory. Just keep it easy and simple to do.

This project may take some time to complete, so be prepared to come back to it to finish in over a few sessions.

I hope you enjoyed taking some time to reflect on your past year, and are excited to make even more memories in the next!

Happy Crafting!