The Collision of Scrapbooks and Stories

Our wedding album arrived in Saturday's mail, and I may or may not have carried it with me everywhere this week, its audience including everyone from my mother to the Hobby Lobby cashier. I have no shame.

I've had several people ask me how I scrapbook - both the program and the process, so I thought I'd give you some of my strategies. I'm passionate about scrapbooking because it's how my love of writing and my love of pictures meet. Every scrapper has her own style, and I don't think there's a right or wrong way.

* I scrap at Picaboo. I used to do traditional scrapbooking with piles of traditional albums and papers, stamps, ink pads, photo prints...you name it. Then I found Picaboo, which is an online scrapping site. I downloaded their program free - scrapped in what I feel is a very user-friendly site - and when you have an album complete - you order it! It arrives bound like a professional looking book. Much smaller than the traditional albums - and very polished. Tons of options in the program for cropping, making backgrounds, adding borders, changing photo shapes and fonts. And best of all - I can transport it anywhere with simply taking my laptop. I love it.

* Yearbooks and event books. I make one book {this year it's two because we have been SO BUSY!} for each calendar year - it offers one or two pages for each event throughout the year. A synopsis, if you will. Then I make an additional book to cover specific events - like vacations, our wedding, my baptism - etc. That way I can cover those special days/weeks in more detail than I can do in the yearbook.

* The standards. When I'm doing a yearbook page {and most pages in other books} - I always put a title at the top of the page. No fancy title bar..just the words. Sometimes I make it creative, but if I can't come up with something catchy - I just describe the event. I try to include anywhere from 5-10 pictures, along with a paragraph or so about the event, summarizing what happened. I also ALWAYS include the date at the end of the paragraph. It's part of the history-keeping.

* The details. I try, when recording the page, to include details I might know now...but I might not always remember - or someone else looking at the book might not know. So I always try to use full names somewhere on the page, the location of the event, if it's not a common location, and other details. {In this page, I included the topic I spoke about, the songs my friend Kari sang, the number of people who attended, and the fact that I spoke barefoot.}

* The style. I love the look of borders on the pictures, so I always use borders. I try to make the borders match the colors in the pictures. Picaboo has a tool that allows you to use a "dropper" to pick up a color out of a picture and make the border. I use that on every page. I also {now} add different shapes of pictures just to mix it up. I overlap pictures and do angles. And whenever possible, I use one of my own pictures for the background. {I usually take pictures just for backgrounds.} If I don't have something, I pick from the background options online.

* Story pages. When I do a book about an event, I often cut and paste text that tells a story. {Could come from my blog recap of the event or from something I wrote for the event.} This page is from my baptism album and is an excerpt of my faith story, which I wrote out and presented to everyone who attended the baptism. I wanted to include it in the album.

* Picture pages. Sometimes I do pages that are all pictures. This doesn't happen in yearbooks, but I do it in event books to capture pictures that need no words. Our wedding album had several pages like this.

* Capture it all. I like to capture every detail. When I go on vacation, I take pictures of the hotel room. I take pictures of the places we eat - including the food. I take pictures of weird things, funny things - all the things. And I put it ALL in the vacation album so I can go back and relive every memory!

And that's how I scrap in Shafferland. I love doing it. I love keeping this record of the life God has given us!!