Less Stress, Less Mess: How I chose digital scrapbooking

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My mother does it. My sisters do it. My friends do it. But I have to admit it: I don't scrapbook.

Don't get me wrong: I love scrapbooks (when they're made by someone else). I like to look at the intricately designed, all-too-cute pages with beautifully cropped, matted and embellished photographs placed perfectly on prettily stamped, embossed patterned paper. I like to chronicle my life on archival-quality-acid-free-will-never-eat-your-photos-remember-this-event-forever cardstock. However, I don't scrapbook.

Really, there are three things standing in my way: I am bereft of supplies, time and skill. I despair of ever creating the gorgeous albums that sit proudly in the homes of my parents, siblings and neighbors?and for what? I don't have the neat pinking shears or the perfect shade of cardstock and acid-free markers. I don't have the time to sit down and spend hours crafting a single page.

Most of all, when I do invest the time, money and effort into creating scrapbook pages, they turn out . . . bad. Really bad. The one time one turned out good, I realized I'd done the back of the page upside down.

Then it hit me?my computer! I already had all my photos stored on my computer and often used it for photo editing; why not create gorgeous pages to save forever that way? It would be easy to share them with friends and family over the Internet. I could certainly make time for digital scrapbooking instead of aimlessly surfing the Internet.

Unfortunately, I was still left with one stumbling block: skill. I knew my digital scrapbooking pages would end up just as silly-looking as my feeble paper attempts unless I developed a more attuned ability for layouts, cropping, embellishments and matting.

I weighed my alternatives: find a local scrapbooking store offering intensive classes, or find an online course. I realized that a scrapbooking store would certainly try to sell their own products, and probably wouldn't be able to help me with digital scrapbooking. Also, I'd have to devote an entire afternoon or a whole day to the tedious trimming and continuous cutting?and who knows if I'd even really learn skills? I might learn how to make the same page as the instructor did, but will I learn to make my own creative pages?

Eventually, I found an online scrapbooking class with an amazing guarantee. My class taught me how to make more than how to make one particular page: it taught me to real scrapbooking skills that I can use to catalogue the rest of my family's lives together. It even helped me with digital scrapbooking. I can't wait to get started! Now, if only I could find a little more time...

You can learn how to create your own scrapbook layout ideas, too. Sorry, I don't have any ideas on how you can make more time for scrapbooking--but you'll definitely want to!