Credits: School’s In by Twin Mom Scraps, A Brand New Day by Inspired Designs, Journal card from Blustery Day by Suzy Q Scraps

Journaling:

Scrapbooking

I am pleased with how much my scrapbooking has grown. I’m not just talking about my abilities in digi-scrapping, but scrapbooking in general. Scrapbooking has always been about holding on to my memories. It is about the photographs. Well at first it was just about the photographs. I have photographs I took in eighth grade on our class trip to Washington DC. For the most party they aren’t labeled and they are in an old school sticky back album. I can look at them now and remember a lot of the names of my classmates, but not all of them and I remember some of the places but not all of them. It’s still fun to look at the old photos.

By the time the French Club went to Quebec for a week during the summer between tenth and eleventh grade I had an idea about writing down where I was and what I was seeing on little strips of paper. My photo albums were becoming “interesting” because there was a little more to remember, a little more to share.

As the years went on, I began to add ephemera: brochures, ticket stubs, little paper things from trips and events. Then the strips of papers sometimes became small blocks with a paragraph or two. My photo albums were starting to morph into scrapbooks. I was shopping in the craft stores and picking out elements to add to my photo albums. Not long after that I was adding paper pieces behind the photos and soon I was creating my photo pages on the pretty sheets of paper and sliding my pages into books of plastic protector pages. When the day came that I cut my photos into shapes and styles to fit with my papers, elements and ephemera, I was a scrapbooker!

I didn’t use thick elements to add depth because I didn’t like bulky albums and I never used buttons; I just don’t like the look of buttons with holes in them. But I did stack, overlap and frame, I had a couple huge boxes of materials and a crop bag that held an album, paper, photos and all of my paper punches, glue sticks, colored markers and scissors in straight, zigzag, curvy and a few other styles. I was really getting into storing my memories in an artistic way adding all of the pieces and not just photos, adding a little story and not just a caption.

In 2006 I discovered digital scrapbooking, I tried my hand at a digital page after seeing some pages a Yahoo 360 friend did, including one she did with a picture of me that she really liked from my profile. I had some background in graphics and used that knowledge and my Photoshop 5 program to add some text and blending to make a 4x6 page of my nieces. I was pretty pleased with that page and made a small memory book for my then boyfriend’s 40th birthday.

By 2007 I’d pretty much switched to strictly digital scrapbooking, giving up the little bits of paper on my floor and packing everything up when I was done for pixels and a program that could stay open and wait until I came back to finish.