Story Play Dogs + Cats | Special Guest Jill Drangsholt

Hi friends! Jill here. This week of telling stories about our dogs and cats came at the perfect time because my long haired dachshund, Samson, just turned 17! I know, I can't believe it either. So I really wanted to create a page celebrating this huge milestone and all of our years together.

While I was watching Ali's live craft with me in the Q&A storyteller kit classroom, I was inspired by how she used one of the papers with a bunch of colorful squares to make frames for flower photos and thought that would be a cute way to include photos of Samson throughout the years of his life.

I decided to pair this cute 12x12 grid with a 3x8 page on the right for some journaling about 5 things I love about Samson right now and a bit of that cute line drawn dog vellum on the back.

You can hear more about my thought process for this project in my intro video below and then dive into my process videos. I have broken up the process into two parts: the main process of how I created the grid and the stamping.

Here are a few close up photos of the page and written instructions for how I made it:

I cut up the squares from the original grid paper and laid them out on my background 12x12 paper in the same order. For the most part I kept them that way except for a few tweaks here and there. Someone went through the effort of designing this paper to make these colors all look cute together so we might as well work with that!

I cut several 2x2 squares out of the dog vellum (making sure to leave enough leftover for a 3x8) and replaced 4 of the squares with these vellum pieces. I tried to keep them pretty spread out to maintain balance. I also chose three squares to be a home for the circle chipboard pieces, forming a visual triangle. I adhered my 18 photos of Samson in chronological order to the remaining squares and then added little circle numbers (from the 2025 Week in the Life collection) to the bottom of each to represent his age.

To help me attach the squares in a grid that is relatively straight, I used some washi tape around the edge of the paper to give me a nice frame to work with. Check out my process video to see how that worked. I also decided to adhere the vellum pieces with just a single line of stitching (alternating what side it was on) so I wouldn't cover up too much of the cute design. I love the pop of texture and color that it provides.

For my 3x8 journaling card, I used the top part of one of the 3x4 cards for the title and then stamped some large numbers along the side from the Numbers are Awesome #7 set (in rainbow colors of course!). On the back I put a 3x8 piece of the line drawn dogs with a vellum happy birthday balloon from the Birthday Story kit and a bit of teal stitching to represent the string.

This ended up being one of my favorite projects this year so I hope you enjoyed watching me put it together! You can follow along with my other crafting adventures on Instagram (@jill.drangsholt).