Nothing to See Here…

Long ago and far away, I was introduced to the world of scrap-booking.  It was a messy world, fraught with bits of paper, sticky tape, bits and bobs.  It required someone to be organized and to clean up after herself.  That wasn’t me and so after a mere single scrapbook, I never did it again.

A few years later, I came to learn that there is a digital version of this hobby and in about thirty seconds, I was hooked!  No mess whatsoever!  Lots of fun digital bits and bobs to create scrapbook pages!  A portable hobby that could go wherever my laptop went (to New York! to London! at the airport! at the office! on the patio! anywhere!!)

I have been invovled with this hobby ever since, off and on.  When I had my first 12X12 pages printed up, it was expensive and holy cow were they big!  From then on, I tried to be an economical digi-scrapper, making sure to use all of that 12X12 space with many photos.  I was determined to get the most for my money and not waste any of that valuable digital real estate.

I felt trapped by this.  So many other excellent scrappers would present beautiful layouts with just a single photograph as the focus point.  I couldn’t bring myself to do it!  But all that is behind me now because as of yesterday, I have officially switched to 8X8 scrapping.  The printed pages are much more reasonable, as are the albums.  And I don’t feel compelled to make each page accommodate multiple photos.  It’s very freeing.  Had I been of age back in the 60s, I bet I would have felt the same way about burning my bra.

So here I am reinvigorated after having been on hiatus for awhile.  Just since yesterday, I’ve turned in six layouts!

For those of you who read here, if you have an interest in seeing my pages, there is a link to my scrapbook gallery right there in the main menu bar.  For those of you who also do scrapping (digital or otherwise), I’d love to peek into your galleries if you have the ability to share.  For those of you who think “Wow, great hobby, how does one get started?” feel free to email me and I’ll help you to the extent I can.  I’m not even in the same league as many women who have raised this to an artform extrordinaire’ but I do OK.

I thought I’d share a few of my recent layouts here:

Jadyn:

Me:

Sarah and Raena:

Bill:

My nephew, Nathan:

Jadyn again:

Sarah:

Baby Rae-Rae:

All told, I’ve done about 200 layouts.  These are the thumbnail views, but in my gallery you can see them larger and read the journaling.

I mentioned in a previous post that if I die, I have nothing of value to leave to my daughters.  I was lying in that post, because these - my scrapbooks - are priceless.