Scrapbooking: The Return.

January continues to be a very uneventful month. Since there's nothing new to report, I thought I'd share some scrapbook layouts that I recently made.

When I sat down to scrapbook a couple of weeks ago, I realized that I hardly made anything during 2008, beyond the mini album for Lauren and a few pages. I still love scrapbooking, but unfortunately, my workflow takes a lot more focus and time than I have available. It goes something like this:

1. Come up with a concept: This part is easy. When I think of an idea, I make sure I write it down in my notebook. Then when I have the urge to scrapbook, I have a bunch of ideas to work from.

2. Create layout design, edit and print photos: This is done at the computer. Sometimes I'll flip through a book or magazine for inspiration on photo placement, sometimes I'll come up with something on my own just playing around in Photoshop.

3. Choose cardstock, paper and embellishments: If I have a mental block, this can be very time consuming.

4. Put it all together: Now at this point, I can easily entertain Lauren while I work just by giving her some paper, stamps and stickers of her own to use.

5. Journalling: Back to the computer. I made an honest attempt at using my own handwriting, but I just can't do it. More on that later.

So my newer hobbies like embroidery didn't really replace scrapbooking, but it sure is a lot easier for me to follow Lauren around from room to room with my embroidery in hand than it is for me to have uninterrupted time at the computer. Nonetheless, I'm going to continue to try and figure out ways to make my scrapbooking more efficient, because I have a lot of good ideas that I want to bring to life!



Here is one of my first efforts in making more family oriented pages. As Lauren gets older, there will be less and less firsts to document and more of how we interact together.



I actually started this page sometime last year, but never finished it. It was originally to have a small photo of Lauren sitting in the chair, but I needed the space to fit in the journalling. It actually worked out better because it's more a page about the chair than about Lauren. This gave me the idea to make more pages about special objects in our home and why they are meaningful. Of the four, I like this one the best, even though the "R" looks like I bled on it and the type isn't centered.



The Scrabble tiles were left over from another half finished project of mine. The title was the only word that the remaining tiles could spell out that was relevant to the page. Stupid me didn't get a photo of Mark pushing Lauren that day. I had to screen cap the video that I took. As a result, that photo is poorer quality than the rest, but the page wouldn't be complete with out it.

Lastly, each of these pages originally had hand written journalling. At that point, I had considered them complete and had thought that I had convinced myself that my hand writing didn't look so bad after all. Then I had to go and flip through my albums and see how nice and clean the printed type looked on my pages. So I typed and printed all the journalling in Photoshop. With this kind of obsessive compulsive behavior, it's no wonder that I only made four pages last year!