Well, not really LOL. However, I do have the honour of being the first weekly hostess at Write.Click.Scrapbook and that's kind of exciting, right? Truth be told, I have major performance anxiety and I spent a lot of time thinking about what topics might be interesting to our blog readers. After a few sleepless nights (well, not entire nights but definitely a few awake wee morning hours), I still have no idea and so I will just post about a few topics dear to my heart hoping that they strike a chord with SOMEONE :)
I don't know about you but I've had a blast reading about the Collective's scrapping journeys so I'm going to start this week off by sharing mine.
Like many others, my first encounter with scrapbooking was through Creative Memories. My husband's aunt was a consultant and she gave me a wedding scrapbook when we got married. That scrapbook was put away shamelessly since I had no idea what to do with it (confession - it's still packed away somewhere and I still haven't scrapped my wedding pictures). When I was pregnant with my first, I was strong armed into going to a CM party at her house and somehow ended up buying the entire starter kit, much do my husband's dismay. It was expensive LOL! Below is the second page I ever scrapped. Notice the triangle under the picture, the crooked deco scissor border with punched circles, and the random stickers (a frog? REALLY? What was I thinking???).
A few months later, I walked into Michael's and bought a bunch of cardstock and a paper stack. I honestly thought I was in scrapbooking heaven! Around the same time, I also discovered some online galleries (though I can't remember which ones) and saw that some people used fonts for titles and computer journaling. WOW. Talk about exciting!!! Any font I wanted!!! Neat journaling!!! From that point on, I started to deviate a bit from my white background and stickers layouts, creating pages like this one for a while (yes, at the time I thought those little blue squares were VERY clever):
I scrapped that way until 2005 when a few events set me on a whole new path. First, I bought a book called Clean and Simple Scrapbooking by Cathy Zielske. I had never read anything like it before and I couldn't put it down. I fell in love with her style, with her way of telling stories, and decided I wanted to scrap like her. I thought that it would be easier to scraplift her in digital format so I taught myself to use Photoshop and started scrapping digitally. Around the same time, I joined a (now defunct) online community where I met some friends who encouraged me to submit a few layouts. They were simple scrappers so Simple Scrapbooks was the first magazine to receive my submissions. As it turns out, my very first submission which also was my very first digital layout, was requested for the online Inspiration gallery. That was another WOW moment (duuuude, I got paid for a layout!!!!). Sadly, I cannot find that layout to show you as it's lost in one of the many hard drives we own, but it holds a very special place in my heart.
For the next couple of years, I honed my design skills via Cathy's column in Simple Scrapbooks and scrapped mostly 8.5 x 11 pages with single pictures and cardstock. I loved that style of pages and to this day still love the layouts I created then:
In 2008 however, I looked at my pile of completed layouts and was completely overwhelmed. I am a pretty fast scrapper and had scrapped A LOT OF LAYOUTS in those single photo years. That wasn't a bad thing in itself but I was trying to declutter and simplify my life. I wanted to scrap MORE pictures with fewer layouts. My solution? Switching to 12 x 12 pages. When I did that, I found that cardstock looked really plain on a 12x12 page (whereas I loved the crisp look of it on 8.5x11 pages) so I started to use the patterned papers I had thus far considered too pretty to use. Thus, my affair with patterned paper began :) To this day, this is the style of pages that I create...multiple picture layouts heavy on patterned papers and fairly light on embellishments:
These layouts represent my current style, one that I'm really comfortable with. I have no doubt that my scrapping journey isn't complete and that my style is ever evolving...that's what keeps this hobby fresh and exciting for me :)
Well, I hope I haven't bored you to tears and that you'll come back tomorrow. I've planned a post called "I'm lazy and it's been good for my scrapbooking". I kid you not :)
