P365 - Day 17 creating keepsakes

The January issue of Creating Keepsakes arrived in my mailbox today.

It’s the Australian edition of an American magazine, so it has pretty much everything the American one does, with Australian ads and a section for Australian readers to submit layouts.  The style of a lot of the layouts in the magazine seems quite different to the style of the layouts published in the Australian magazines I’ve seen.

It’s my favourite scrapbooking magazine, as it seems to showcase the style of scrapping that I’ve developed over the past four years.  That is, my style has evolved thanks to the ideas that I’ve got from the magazine.

In general, I prefer clean, linear layouts, generally with lots of photos and minimal embellishments. At most events I take a lot of photos and I find it impossible to narrow it down to one or two good ones to scrap, so I end up reducing the size of a large number of photos and putting them all on the page. Most of my multiphoto pages are based on a grid, or a version of a grid, so there are lots of straight lines.

Here are some examples:

Luna Park page 1

Luna Park page 2

To my logical and ordered way of looking at the world, the grid layout is a great way to tell the story, and I find using heaps of photos tells the story better than I could do using one or two photos on a layout. (One school of thought is that you should just pick the best couple of pictures and just scrap those, but I can’t bring myself to not use photos that are halfway decent.) The alternative is to use lots of photos over lots of layouts for each event, but I simply don’t have the time to do that, and I’m so far behind on scrapping the photos from juniordwarf's first three years that it would never happen.

That said, when I have special photos, or particularly good ones, I love to do a more detailed layout with more ‘stuff’ all over the page. Like this one:

And I do try to break up the straight lines with various bits and pieces, so the layouts aren’t too boring and samey.

Even though my own style is very simple and linear, I love looking at my scrappy friends’ layouts, as these talented ladies do some absolutely stunning layouts that are the complete opposite of the layouts I normally do.  They’re the kind of layouts that magazines publish, and I’m often in awe of how they turn out.

That’s one of the great things about scrapbooking. It can be whatever you want it to be – and whatever you need it to be. You can create elaborate artworks that are completely breathtaking or you can stick some photos onto a page and write their story. You can develop styles such as ‘grunge’, ‘freestyle’, ‘whimsical’, ‘vintage, ‘shabby chic’ and so on. You can highlight one photo or use many. There are no rules, and if there are, you can break them.  It’s all about what you want and how you want to display your photos and memories.

Scrapbooking a way of preserving your memories, of showcasing your photos and of telling your stories. Sure, I could just stick the photos in albums. It would save me time and a hell of a lot of money. My house would be tidier. And my photos would still be preserved.

But I enjoy the thrill of creating a beautiful page that makes the most of my photos. I love finding a piece of paper that exactly matches one of the colours in my photos (this can be an extremely time consuming and frustrating process, but sometimes my perfectionist nature will accept nothing less than an exact match). I love watching my scrappy friends create their stunning pages and getting ideas from them.

It’s fun, it’s relaxing (except on those occasions when a layout just won’t come together and there’s nothing I can think of to do with it), it’s a way that I can be creative (I never saw myself as creative – but that’s another post for another day) and it showcases my photos beautifully.

I can’t imagine not scrapbooking.