My First Scrapbooks

I started scrapbooking a year after my son was born. Sad to say I used those magnetic photo albums that are laden with chemicals that seeped through the pictures like rust on iron. I recycled greetings cards to decorate the pages. I even went to the extent of buying greeting cards to use as embellishments. The layouts I made were beautiful. The journal was typed-written on bond paper and pasted on colored art paper. I meticulously hand-cut the edges of each tag and label. The paste of course was probably not acid-free.

When my daughter was born 12 years later I did the same thing. The result was the same - faded pictures.

Now I know why my aunts kept their pictures in photo albums with black pages and a page of vellum in between each page protecting the pictures from the black page before it. They even bought photo corners to hold their pictures. I watched them arrange the pictures on those pages, wondering why they just don't paste the other pictures on the pages when they ran out of photo corners.
Did they know something then about the term "acid-free" or did they use these supplies because they were the only ones available during that time?

Now I know better, so I'm racing against time saving those faded memories by scanning and retouching them. It is a lot of work but it will be worth it!

Publishing

I can't believe I've made so many digital layouts already! At first I just made them for my family. Now I'm making some for friends, my sister, my brother, nieces and nephews... At first I just kept dragging and dropping embellishments here and there without taking note where they are from.

Now that I want to publish... I can't give credit where credit is due! Ay-yay-yay!!! It's good I kept all the terms of agreement that came with the digital supplies so now that I make new ones I note down the credits.

So I've added more things on my to-do-list:

• as I go through my digital supplies making new layouts and I come across a design I've used before, go back to the layout and add the credits there.


• as I go through my digital LOs to add the credits, resize for publishing*, rename to add the source of the supplies, save in a different folder so it will be easy to locate when ready to publish.

*Some sites allow only a maximum of 130KB per LO. Mine are mostly 200KB+

I will probably come up with 10 more things but these will do for now.

My sister, Lee, made this. I am so proud of her!

I am talking her into making digital LOs as well because she says she has lots of pictures and has a difficult time choosing which ones to scrap.

Keep it up, Lee!!!

My Space

My favorite subject to scrap is my daughter of course. She takes a lot of pictures and lots of self-portraits. I want to make layouts of them all! I always encourage her to do her own digital scrapbooks so she could personalize the journaling part. She says she is always busy and doesn't have time. But she does have time for her MySpace, using photoshop to make her pictures "different". I am not invited to her space [sigh...]. Although once in a while when she's on it she shows it to me. I love how she personalized her space. I wish I could do the same, but like her, my excuse is I'm too busy to find out how to do that. Perhaps...one of these days I will have Myspace.




In the mean time, I have my own space. I call it my "kalat" room {kalat=mess}. Appropriately named. I have everything in one place (more like everything everywhere). I'm all messed up if anyone cleans up my mess.

I collect anything that collects dust. The latest craze? After the Barbies came the scrap-booking papers and embellishments.

So here's one corner of my kalat room, and here's another. I love my doll collection! They're everywhere. And they make me smile.

Gotta Start Somewhere

I've been around long enough and have accumulated a lot of memories, some have faded, some completely tucked away and forgotten...for now; some funny, some sad, some exciting, some bad...well in short, up here in my brain, is a colorful tapestry of memories. What a waste if I don't get them written down and shared with people who care.

I don't really know where to start right now. There is so much to do and say. Perhaps the topic of taking pictures is a good start. Yes, I am one of those who spend more time taking pictures instead of mingling and gossiping at family gatherings. (Well, that is not entirely true.. tee-hee...there's about 20% of gossiping going on. Oh, alright! 25%.) I even collect pictures from friends and relatives. I just want to have pictures of them to see how they have grown and developed. Pictures tell a silent story.

Now, what do I do with all those pictures? I have so many plans about them I get so dizzy just thinking of what to do first.