Yeah this is a craft entry. It's also a cold-brain fluff craft entry, so if it doesn't make any sense, well, you can cope.
I've been scrapping again, having had a drought from when I packed up all my scrapbooking stuff in August last year, finally got it all back in March when we moved and then I had a lot of baby quilts to make and whenever I had time to do some scrapbooking I just felt a little intimidated. I had so much to catch up on, where to start?
Organising my scrapbooking area better helped a lot. Making the area both prettier and more functional went a huge way to getting over the mental block I had about starting. I like things to be pretty, I'm Libran that way.
Of course, once I sat down and actually started doing it I had no problems churning out pages, because I had so much to catch up on it was okay to skip around times and placed and just do whatever I wanted to.
However, I'm kind of unsatisfied with what I've done. The pages look fine, but they lack X Factor, they just aren't pretty enough. I made a lot of no-effort pages and it shows. The awesome thing about scrapbooking compared to a bunch of other crafts I do is that it really doesn't matter if you go back later and fix it up. You stick a finished page into a page protector and at any time in the future you can just pull it out again, add some more stuff, put in journalling, even start over, so I'm not that concerned about the pages looking not-awesome, I'm just trying to figure out how I can awesome-them-up some more.
There are heaps of resources online for scrapbooking, so in addition to reading the books I have and pouring through a scrapbooking magazine, I've found useful stuff at various websites.
TwoPeasinabucket is always being mentioned in magazines, they have a huge range of stuff going on, products for sale, bulletin boards full of people giving each other help and heaps of tips and ideas.
Scrapbooking 101 has a weekly article, her 10 best shortcuts one is great.
I have been careful lately to use the papers that I already own. Scrapbooking is not a cheap craft for me because I am so drawn to the pretty new things that I really have more supplies than I need. So using up what I already have is a priority. When I reorganised my desk I was brave and actually got rid of papers that I didn't think I'd ever really use. I have only been buying stickers if I can immediately think of where I can use them, with what photos, what pages, etc.
Etsy is all full of pretty pretty things I love. But haven't bought.
I have been having trouble making a title page for my current album. My first big album was just called 'House of Friends". My last one was called 'World where I live" which I was very pleased with, and I want something equally good. A little tootle about online has brought up:
Scrapsayings which is a very hard to look at homepage that leads onto good lists of title ideas.
and Perfect Title which is heaps easier to look at and has a bit more stuff on it as well. You just click on the general type of title you want on the menu on the left hand side and get a list. I like the Western ones!
So, any suggestions from the floor for the title for my latest big, general album about the stuff I do and the people I love? I'm thinking something about the world, or life in general, something catchy and fun. Otherwise I'm tempted to use "Thank God I'm a Country Boy!" and that makes zero sense.
PS. Cleolinda linked me also to scrapgirls which is a nice site, but they do digital scrapbooking and yeah, I just can't get into that idea. I like having the physical book to hand to people. I like watching over their shoulders as they look through what I've done.
Posted by jenni at August 16, 2008 04:35 PM