Working in a paper warehouse with an inventory full of sparkly, glitter-kissed, rich-colored sheets of beauty, I almost feel guilty that scrapbooking and craft-making aren’t notably high on my list of talents.  I do dream about all of the wonderful things that the paper could be used for, but when I try to turn my dreams into reality, some of the awesomeness seems to get lost in the translation. 

This wouldn’t be so troubling except as a mother of two, there are times when I need to step up to the proverbial plate and make stuff.  It seems their homework is sometimes intended to be my homework with as much interaction is required.  And sometimes, on Saturday afternoons, the summer heat demands an indoor activity, and I don’t want to be one of those parents that turns on cable and checks out.  I want to interact to do something fun that we can all enjoy.

That being said, my kids will be going back to school on Monday.  Back to school means my kids will be taking a plethora of new school supply items as well as personal items to their classroom and will soon be coming home with books and/or other items belonging to the school.  One thing that’s inescapable is the yearly ritual of labeling all of your child’s belongings to avoid losing things in the midst of 30 new students trying to get organized.  I wanted to create a label that would stand out and be unique, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time coming up with a new design for something that’s probably been done thousands of times already.  So, I went to microsoft.com’s template section and did a search for “school.”  My search returned numerous handy items for every possible back-to-school need including the adorable label I customized for our website sample.  I selected the Stardream paper because of it’s beautiful shimmer and because of the wide selection of colors, making it easy to find something appropriate for use with either gender . Try it out yourself and see how easy it is to create something memorable for your family!  Being crafty doesn’t always mean that you have to be creative or spend a lot of time coming up with unique design.  Sometimes it means that you use available resources and add a quick unique customization that is achieved with something as simple as a beautiful piece of paper.