A new venture this year that I’m taking on is Den Mother for Cub Scouts. My husband came home one evening and let me know he volunteered to be Den leader. I was really happy he wanted to be involved in this and that my son wanted to do scouts. I sort of imagined we’d always have cub scouts with all of the camping and outdoor activities we do!
One of the first projects as Den leader for Ian came in the form of a Family Scrapbook project. I had a $50 budget for this- so to Hobby Lobby I went. I wanted to share a tutorial on this project because I know a lot of dens do this project and if it helps someone else with ideas for their own then I’m happy to share how I did ours!
For this project I picked up the following:
Thick cardboard type pieces for the covers
Colored card stock for cut outs (Red, Brown, Orange, Blue)
1 Package of off-White card stock (For pages of books)
Camping themed stickers
Twine (We did not end up using this)
Crop a dial (This is a fancy tool that is like a hole punch but for thicker material like the cardboard covers.
1″ Album rings
Glue sticks for the kids to put it all together
Other needed items:
Scissors
Paper cutter to cut book covers and paper to size
1) The first thing I did was decide what size I wanted the books to be. We went with 8×8. I cut all of the thick cardboard covers to 8×8 using my paper cutter. For 8 books, you will need 16 8×8 pieces.
2) Cut the pages out for the books. For each book, I decided on 16 pages, which is 8 two sided pieces of paper. I cut the pages for inside of the book to 7.5 x 7.5. This ensured they would fit nicely inside the covers. This is 64 pieces of paper being cut if you want 8 in each book.
3) Print and cut out pieces for the cover. This step took the longest. I did a google search for the cub scout cut out, the tent, and the fire. I copied these images into Microsoft Word 8 times, then printed them on the colored card stock. I then spent a couple of hours cutting out the fire, tents, and cub scout logo. I cut small rectangles on the brown paper for the wood of the fire. I wanted the Cub Scout Promise on there as well, so I typed that up and cut those out too as well as a rectangle that says “Family Scrapbook” with a line so we could write each boy’s family name on the book.
4) Three hole punch all of the covers and pages. The easiest way I found to do this was to put the paper pages in between the covers and punch together at the same time so the holes were all lined up. This is where the crop-a-dial came in handy. With a regular hole punch I wouldn’t have been able to hole punch them all together.
4) Put all cut out pieces, covers, pages, three album rings for each book in a large ziplock bag so each boy has a bag with all items to make their own book.
5) I then sent all of the bags, along with some Camping themed stickers, and glue sticks with my husband to Scouts for the project. The boys loved it and they turned out great. The boys used the camping stickers for the pages inside of the book or on the back of the book, wherever they wanted them.
I hope this tutorial is helpful! Feel free to share or pin it to Pinterest! Let me know how yours turned out!
so cute!