Fleur de Lis Mini Album (surprise winner!)

My kids and husband laugh at me because sometimes I "heart" every single photo on my Instagram feed.  I like the pictures because they are always awesome!  Sometimes I don't even read what the photo is about.

So a few weeks ago, I did my normal...'I will like this photo without reading the caption' and the next day I see that I am tagged in this photo:

What???  I didn't even remember entering a contest.  Normally, on Instagram, you have to tag people to win stuff or repost the picture and hashtag and tag the contest coordinator.  So this time I had to look to see what I won.  It was a cute Fleur de Lis wood mini album from Genuinely Jane Studios.

Luckily, my kids went to a high school where the fleur de lis was their emblem--otherwise I would have felt bad for taking the prize. :/

I knew right away that I would decorate it and put their first day of school for each year they were in high school.  I could have just used the book as it was, but I decided to take it apart and only use 2 of the "pages" as the cover and the back.  Then I traced them to make inside pages in the school colors (orange and blue).

After, I painted one wood cover blue and the other orange.  My local scrapbook store, Scrapbook Island, carries 12 x 12 paper with the local high school names and logos and coordinating paper. So I covered the front and back with that. 

After all the work of tracing, cutting the odd shape, painting, and using an exacto knife to trim around the paper I covered the front and back with...I was pretty much done...I was at the point where I just wanted to finish it.

So here is my pretty plain mini album...maybe someday I will go back and embellish a bit more...maybe.

I can't believe it is ending soon!  My daughter was a sport and took a selfie on her first day of college for me, but I am sure my son will "forget" if I ask him.