At Last

I once lived in a town where the shopping possibilities were nearly endless. I once lived in a town where the Saturday Market was like a big, weird party located in the center of town. I once lived in Eugene, Oregon. Oh how I miss Eugene. Now I live in a town where our only department store has gone bankrupt; where everything closes at 5:00 pm; and where, up until this last Sunday, the only craft store was a JoAnn Fabric & Crafts.

That's right ... we now have ... (drum roll please) ... a Michael's Crafts! It's about stinking time! Now I might have a new hangout, a place to find solace, a place where I can go that doesn't close too early. Yesterday I took my kids there because it had just opened. My daughter immediately started going NUTS! Before I knew it she was pulling stickers off the shelves and filling the cart - whoa there little lady, I'm not spending $4.99 on Martha Stewart heart shaped stickers if I can get them for $1.99 two isles away! She wanted to do a "project" really bad so we decided that she could work on a scrapbook page. Satisfied with some Jolee's vellum stickers, we continued throughout the store.

Immediately the creativity started to flow for me. But I will have to go back, without the kids, to truly appreciate the store in all of its splendor.

The scrapbook page my daughter worked on ended up like this:

Really she just likes to put stickers on, well ... everything. But she did choose the background and the photo. I then let her have free reign over where to put the sparkle stickers. As you can see she likes to load them up in one spot!

While we are on the subject, here are some other pages she has done:

Halloween - Snow White

Halloween - Tinkerbell

Thanks to Michael's, the scrapbook store and a daughter who loves to work on projects, I can now get some scrapbook pages done with little involvement on my part. Just buy some stickers, some fun paper and let my girl go to town. Now THAT'S my kind of scrapbooking!

Blurb

As a graphic and web designer, I find that I spend a lot of time in front of the computer. So one would think that I would like scrapbooking to record my life's memories and get away from the digital world for a while. The truth is, I don't enjoy trimming, cutting, cropping or measuring. I wish I did, it would be a nice vacation from staring at a screen.

I have done some scrapbooking in the past, it is very popular with other moms I know. But I feel overwhelmed with the different papers and embellishments. I also hate to mess up – I guess I am just used to using the delete key or the “control+z” command - and I get disappointed if I cut something the wrong size or glue something down in the wrong place and can't undo it. Also it is very hard to find the time to just sit down and do a layout. A few years ago someone told me about MyPublisher. This free program is great for creating coffee table style books using personal photos. Since then I have made a paperback book every year chronicling our Christmas season complete with captions, and I even did a portfolio book for a client. This is basically my version of a scrapbook.

I have recently discovered a company that does the same thing but instead of a “coffee table book” they call it “bookstore-quality”. Blurb.com seems to have great layouts and options, you can make a wedding album, cook book, portfolio, a blog book, or any kind of photo book you want. Their layouts are modern and classic and the really cool thing is they have a bookstore where you can purchase books from regular people. They have everything from travel & nature to biographies & memoirs. One book I found to be absolutely stunning from the photography to the layout is Garden Culture by Magda Straszynska. If I decide to splurge and buy from this bookstore, it would probably be this book. But then again, I do plan to make a book of my own.

We will be going camping again this weekend, I may not make an entire book about our adventures at the lake, but I plan to add to the 20,000 photos of our kids that we have taken over the last four years. Perhaps we will take some book worthy shots.