Not your Mama's Scrapbooking!

As a child I remember my mom and her scrapbooks and the books that she made for my sister and I. They were huge manila paged books that had photos, birthday cards, letters from my grandparents and others who have planted seeds in my life. With everything taped, glued, photo tabbed or just placed gently in between pages. My mom still has them today, under her bed and they are looked at maybe once every year or two.

So when my BFF Melanie C. invited me to a "Scrapbook Convention" in San Diego, about 7 years ago, I really didn't know what to expect. Those three days in San Diego transformed my life! I think I stayed up for most of the three days - taking classes and then going back to our hotel room and applying those skills I had learned through the day. This was nothing like the scrapbooks my mom had and being a new mom - I was so excited about the ways I could preserve my son's life in a fun and exciting way. Who wouldn't love to look at a scrapbook with depth, stories and adorable photos of my son. Melanie had created a monster and she knew it! That first year I had 3 large scrapbooks full of every little thing my son did...His first bath, his first pumpkin patch, hanging out, spitting up, standing, falling, crying, laughing...I was a woman on a mission -to try just about every gadget or scrapbooking paper, element or technique there was out there.

My first digital page

Digital Scrapping allows you to do things you wouldn't be able to do with Traditional.

But then came child number 2! How was I going to give my daughter the same thing, when I had less time, hardly any money and no room to spread out my scrap station! In my past life I had dabbled in Photoshop for a job that I had and remember my co-worker using Photoshop for laying out her scrapbook pages, so I thought this might be my solution. But what was I going to do for papers or elements. I wasn't that great at Photoshop and couldn't create my own, so I googled "Digital Scrapbooking" and boy was I surprised at what I found. There was this huge community of women who created and shared a lot of their work for free. Some used Photoshop, some used Creative Memories Digital Software and others used Elements. There were several ways to scrap digitally. After some research on my own I discovered that scrapping digitally was for me - at least for this part of my life. Yes I miss the paper in my hands and the photos out on a table in front of me, wondering what I am going to do. But with digital scrapping I was able to give my daughter the scrapbooks that I gave my son and was most importantly able to keep my wallet and sanity in check. :)

Here are a few websites to get you started:

Free Digital Papers/Templates/Elements:

Summertime Designs http://summertimedesigns.blogspot.com/
M Originals http://www.moriginalsblog.com/
Totally Templates http://ditterstemplates.blogspot.com/
Craft Crave- Daily Free Downloads http://digifree.craftcrave.com/

Happy Scrapping!
Becca