My Comeback

I used to scrapbook. A lot. Like pretty much every day. I scrapbooked at home, at crops; sometimes I'd stay up until 3am creating fabulous pages for our scrapbooks. I filled albums for each of my girls, family albums and special projects for grandparents too. I LOVED scrapbooking. And honestly 2 or 3 years ago I couldn't see a time when I wouldn't scrapbook. I was a scrapbooker. I am sure that many of my friends and family still think of me that way. The truth is that up until March 7 of this year, I hadn't scrapbooked in over a year. Maybe more. I still have patterned paper, cardstock, adhesive, and embellishments galore, and I still use them. Just not to scrapbook. I love papercrafting, making tags, gifts, cards and such with my scrapbookig supplies.
But.
I miss scrapbooking. Blogging has fulfilled a lot of my need to record memories with photos, but it isn't quite the same. I don't spotlight on each individual child nearly as much as I did in our scrapbooks. I journal differently when I know that other people will be reading.

I don't want to miss recording this time in their lives and the daily habits and activities that make up our lives right now. I have been giving this quite a bit of that for the past while and then I came across a few new products and decided to give one a try. Becky Higgins released her Project Life kit this month and that is the one I am going with. I am also completely smitten with Simple Stories and really want to purchase this for either last years or next years story telling. With the project life approach I am taking a photo every single day for the year. This is a daunting task for me and I have already missed one day. I am not going to give up however and on the days that I miss I will figure something out....either 2 pics for one of the other days or extra journaling. I don't plan on doing this for every year, but I think it will make for an awesome slice of life look at who we were and what we were doing in 2010. I tend to be more event or personality focused in my scrapbooking and this has helped me to shift my view and include every topic from our busy Thursdays, mealtime, our new dog, the plays and skits my girls put on, cleaning, reading, and I am sure many other day to day activities and items to come. Oh and Project Life is also in digi format. That looks super cool too!
With all of that I still really miss creating beautiful works of art that showcase a person, event or memory that is important to me. So a couple of weeks ago I picked up an old copy of Creating Keepsakes magazine and started thumbing through it. I came to a page I liked and decided to scraplift it. I went to a photo of Miranda that I took in November just after she got her braces on. I knew the look that I was after and quickly found papers in my stash to go along. I also tied this in to two of my themes for this year, #1) Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without and #2) Finish what I've started. Both of these themes focus on using what I already have to finish or create a project without purchasing new materials. Everything I used on this page came from my stash. Some of it is from 10 years ago or more. It felt great to use old product and not care that it wasn't the latest and greatest. One of the reasons that I think I stopped scrapbooking was that after I was published a couple of times I started thinking that each page and creation had to have the freshest product and newest trends. It was a lot of pressure and kind of sucked the life right out of scrapbooking for me. Now I don't care about the trends in the industry or getting published. I just want to find ways to preserve our memories in a meaninful and lasting way. I know that I don't have the time to scrapbook daily like I used to, but it felt really great to complete a layout. I think I'll stick with it. I'm in the middle of another papercrafting project right now that I'll show you when I finish, but I don't think that paper and glue scrapbooking has seen the last of me.
And for me......that's a good thing.