July 8, 2006 – Pinay New Yorker

I spent my lunch hour yesterday downloading scrapbook freebies I had downloaded before my laptop crashed and threw all that into oblivion. While downloading, I tried printing letters for cutting on the swatches pictured below but decided instead to cut hearts in freehand. As you can see, I’m doing both digital and actual scrapbooking. Everything I see around me is actually another possible item for use in my scrapbooks.

I am concentrating on embellishments in the next couple of weeks so I can finish Mom’s scrapbook which is already all set except that I need to embellish some of the pages. It also needs some serious journaling. I’ve attempted to photograph the first four pages but it continues to be a challenge. Being that I’m using 12×12 layouts in two spreads, it’s been a challenge photographing the pages singly (since the lighting sometimes changes page to page) so my next attempt is to photograph two pages as a single layout which is how it works out in the album.

I also cannot put pictures up in the web without giving due credit to the designers and websites from which I culled the materials in each layout. (This is part of scrapbooking etiquette which I am bound to observe since I actively blog about this and am actually part of several online subscriptions from reputable scrapbooking sites.)

Looking back now, I started out over-eager to get my scrapbook paper stocks that I now find myself with stacks of paper I will just have to stash away for future use. Even in doing Mom’s scrapbook, I ended up using more of the paper packs and kits available for download as a set instead of using the kits I tried assembling. I guess it’s part of the learning process in scrapbooking.

I used one kit/scheme for each set. It helped to set a tone as to which pages were connected, and where a new set begins. I’m glad I stopped doing my Paris scrapbook after 4 pages. Now I have a better sense of what I want to do and how I want the scrapbook to look, so it should help me move forward faster. There are a ton of resources online — except for toner and paper, you can have expensive-looking layouts without actually spending on the actual kit.