A Scrapbooking Story

I started scrapbooking in January. My motivation was to make a scrapbook of my sister's wedding and give it to her as a gift. I slowly got about four pages done, then started a new job and stopped scrapping. Well, when I left that job I started up again, and this time around it has gotten to be a full-blown addiction! I adore it. That's why it's one topic of my blog :)

For my sister's wedding scrapbook, I ended up spending a few hundred dollars on supplies. I worked on it for a grand total of 200 hours. It took 8 months, and weighed over 6 pounds. It had a total of 44 pages. It was massive. Here's a video I made of the pages...basically a slideshow.

I have been working on several other scrapbooks along with my sister's. I finally gave my sister her scrapbook, and she loved it (thank God!). I just finished an album for my best friend's birthday and a mini-album featuring my photography and photo manipulations. I'm currently working on my personal scrapbook (no real theme, just life in general) and on an album for my mom's birthday at the end of November.

I've found that I enjoy working on albums that I'm making for someone else a lot more than I like making them for myself. It's heartbreaking giving all that work away, but I will always have fond memories :) And that's exactly why I take photos of all my work!

My favorite place to get layout ideas is from ScrapbooksEtc.com. You have to create an account to download the PDF files, but they have hundreds of layouts. Many of them come with a real-life example, which is very helpful in seeing how it will come together. They offer quite a bit of inspiration, too.

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From my album, "Happiness"

Lauren & Me

This is one of my best friends, Lauren. We were at an All-Time Low show near Chicago and Lauren snapped this shot of us hanging around.

To make this page, I used a template I found on Scrapbook.com. I opened the photo in Photoshop and printed the 12x12 page on four sheets of 8.5x11" computer paper. Then I cut the pages down and taped them together to get my full-size template. I colored with a pencil over the back of the template, and then turned the pages over and traced over the design so it would transfer the graphite onto my scrapbook page. To finish the design, I darkened it with a black ink pen and sharpie.

The butterfly was printed on transparency paper and rubbed on. The title is also a transparency rub-on. The chorus to Mika's "Grace Kelly" is -- you guessed it -- a transparency rub-on as well :)