Craftiliciously Good: A Weekend of Scrapbooking

This weekend I received a notification from Groupon that a voucher I'd bought back in August for a photobook was about to expire, and I should probably go ahead and use it already. Good thing they send reminders - I did remember buying it, but I couldn't for the life of me remember which daily deal site I'd bought it from (I was still pretty sleep deprived back in August and my memory of those days is a bit hazy.) Anyway, here I was with a $50 voucher for Mixbook to use up, and what I thought was a totally finished First Year scrapbook for my son. It wasn't until I took a quick peek at my actual scrapbook that I realized I was missing a bunch of layouts that I thought I'd done. Seems what I'd actually done was think something like "Gee, I really need to put a layout with all of those messy food pictures in the book." and my brain decided that the thinking and the doing were the same actions. So I still had quite a few layouts I wanted to do.

My husband was away this weekend, it was just me and Little Man and no real plans until Sunday night (no Superbowl here - I can't stand football - I was supposed to go to my Mom's for dinner Sunday evening) so I decided to dedicate myself to finishing up all those layouts I wanted to complete.

I'm very proud to say that in 48 hours of scrapbooking (pretty much during naps and after LM went down to bed at night) I managed to complete 17 pages!!!!! Luckily, I'm not a "fancy" scrapbooker. I love the look of clusters and lots of elements used on other people's pages, but it's really not my style. I'm a simpler scrapper. I like my layouts to be about the pictures and the journaling, so I use elements very sparingly, maybe a couple per page. It certainly does make the pages go faster.

So by Sunday night I had the entire book completed, I had 19 pages sent off to Persnickety Prints to print (I started printing my pages there a few months ago - I used to exclusively use Costco, but the cost was getting prohibitive at $3 a page. Even with the $5 that PP charges for shipping, it's totally worth it if you order enough pages at one time, and the quality is amazing - the colours look fantastic. And I love the fact that they charge the same to ship to Canada as they do to the US.) And I had a 67 page book laid out on the Mixbook site. That's one thing I love about using the digital scrapbooking software (I use My Memories Suite - great software and easy to use, check out the link for a coupon code) is that I only had to make up the pages once and I can use them in multiple formats, rather than reloading all my pictures into a photobook and trying to make new layouts and arrangements with them from scratch. After having a couple of friends do a quick proof of them to make sure I didn't have any mistakes, I sent it off, and the first year scrapbook was officially done.

So here are a couple of the layouts I finished this weekend. As you can see, my layouts are pretty plain and simple. It's easy to look at all the elaborate fancy layouts people create and get intimidated and think "Oh my God - I could never do something like that." and write digital scrapbooking off completely, but they don't have to be like that.

Created using Just So Scrappy's Who's At The Zoo kit.