2003 Scrapbook

About a year ago, I went to a Girl Scout leader training event and attended a scrapbooking workshop. Needless to say, I fell in love with the craft. I received many Creative Memories tools and supplies for Christmas and my birthday, though I was too busy to set time aside and work on my book.

I had started with my 2003 photos since I've heard that the general rule of not feeling overwhelmed in scrapbooking is to start with your most recent photos. Then if you ever catch up (but who really does), you can go back and do your old photos as time allows.

So, here is my first completed book--our life in 2003. I wanted to post pictures of my pages for anyone out there looking for ideas. I know that some of my best crafting has come from stealing (well, we'll say borrowing) other people's ideas. You can click on the individual photos to see an enlarged image.

I have started a 2004 book, and I'm hoping to actually re-do our wedding album. However, with Girl Scouts starting up in a few weeks, that may be a challenge!

If you have any questions or comments on the pages, please leave a comment or e-mail me!

I wanted to do a title page for the book. The purple card is a scanned image of a birthday card my friend Lynette sent to me. That's her in the picture on the right. (I'm on the left.)

This was our visit to Old Sturbridge Village. Several scrapbookers asked me how I did the box with the title. I simply used a decorative corner punch and layered the paper. I did the title and most of the journaling in this scrapbook on the computer.

On the left is our trip to the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, CT. The right begins the pages of our spring vacation to Pennsylvania. The flag is actually a background paper. Some scrapbookers asked if I pieced it together.

These are pictures from our day trip to historic Gettysburg.

The page on the left is also about our trip to PA. The title is a sticker that I found at a scrapbooking store. The page on the right is one of my favorites. The latice on the side was done on double-sided paper with a Pop-Ups stencil. The stickers are suede, and I traced a clip art of a buffalo to crop the picture of the buffalo patrol.

Pictures of our little Pinball. The border stickers are 12" long and worked perfectly. I also took vellum cat stickers, placed them on round tags, and finished them off with some brads.

These are pictures from our second trip to PA. The poem on the right was written by Dan's brothers.

The page on the left is pictures from the Cow Parade when it was in West Hartford. The right is our camping trip in Massachusetts.

These page borders were made with Creative Memories Rickrack Short Cuts. The letters were punched with my Sizzix machine (Sizzlits Classic Alphabet).

Here is my first experiment with 3-D embellishments. I'm not sure if I care for them. The spell book was definitely too tall, so I pulled it apart. The "pages" were foam tape, so took half of it out and reassembled it. There was also a witch's broom in the set, but that was too bulky and would have created permanent damage to my pages. My only other problem with these pages is the fact that I put 3-D embellishments in the corners - they make the page protector pucker and expose the page rather than lie flat. It seems obvious, but I don't figure these types of things out easily I guess.

This was my first attempt at actually hand-journaling a page. Turns out that I'm not that bad at it, but I think that I definitly like the look of the typed journals better.

These 5 pages are actually an expand-a-page spread - it flips out to reveal a 12x24 page that I divided up with Christmas morning and afternoon activities. I liked the background papers, but I had a hard time trying to get them to work together. However, in a rush to complete the book, this is how it came out.