What's your scrapping story?

What is your scrapping story? How did you find digital scrapbooking? Did you paper scrap at all?

I collected bits and pieces of paper from events, newspaper clippings, photos, and taped them into the old timey scrapbooks since middle school. After I had kids, I wanted to do "real" scrapbooking, so did buy supplies and made many, many paper albums with Creative Memories supplies. But in 2004, I was in my local Albertsons and saw a magazine among the scrapbooking section and it was all about DIGITAL scrapbooking. Now, I loved my computer and had been using one at home since 1994, so was excited to see what could be done. My world opened up. I found the online communities, I got asked to be on a creative team for a designer, and since I was a blogger, I would post reviews about my finds. Then, Maya at Scrapbookgraphics.com asked if I wanted to help in the community at her non-store site, Digital Art Quirks...it was going to be a place to explore ways to use digital supplies to be creative, not just scrapbook. We were art journaling, creating Artist Trading Cards, running real life trades for the ATCs we'd create, some were hybrid, some were just printouts of our cards. One of my favorite albums is a hybrid rolodex card exchange we did. Yes, we actually MAILED each other our creations!

After a while, we started the creative team at SBG called the Studio Crew (the designers were the Studio Girls). I helped with customer service and the Crew kept the forum and galleries hopping with inspiration and challenges, games and tutorials. We were all learning back then, and it was a blast! We did our monthly collabs called Impressions of...and everyone, designers and creative team, contributed when they could.

I had an amazing studio in my home so I could do both paper and digital projects, often creating hybrid goodies, too. A friend on the Crew gifted me a copy of Photoshop! I was so hooked! We had a blast putting together our inspirational posts for the site blog, and I remember when we started using Facebook to promote them! Brave new world! LOL

I was lucky enough to have some pages featured in magazines, both digital and real life, back then, and was feeling on top of the world...never been happier, but my husband wasn't feeling the same. My digiscrap community definitely helped me through that time. One day in a chat, someone mentioned TPing his house, all in jest, of course...you know, "He left you? We ride at dawn!" My girls had my back. A few days later, rolls of toilet paper in various colors and designs started showing up at my house. I'll never forget that solidarity.

I didn't go back to full-time work immediately after my divorce, but it was inevitable. By 2010 I had found a real life job. Also had to manage the whole back and forth for my youngest still at home after his dad moved 2 hours away. You know, life. So, my scrapbooking came to end. After I sold my house and got rid of all my paper supplies and shelving, everything just kind of got stored.

But around 2018, I think, I got a hankering to see all my scrapbooking stuff. I dragged out my albums and displayed them and they gave me joy. So, slowly but surely, I got back into scrapping. At first I didn't have access to a good program, because I was using a Chromebook. Tried an online tool, and Gimp on an emulator, but nothing replaces Photoshop for me...I missed it so much. Once I was in a better place financially, I bought a new laptop and got right back into it using the multiple gigabytes of supplies I had acquired over the years and stored on a portable hard drive.

All the SBG folks that are still designing are hither and yon. I know I've seen Studio Flergs, Lorie Davison, Mary Fran, Natali Designs, Manu at other sites, but the only one here at TLP is Tangie Baxter. I think it was the Month of Challenges that got me hooked on TLP, so I hang out here. You've got the quirk here, not just the straight-up scrapbooking, so that still speaks to me. I don't have a lot of kid photos to scrap anymore, and no grandkids, so creative journaling helps me scratch the digital art itch.

Thanks for listening to my story and being a part of my chubby grandma scrapbooking era (I know, I don't HAVE grandkids, but I scrap my friends' kids and grandkids!).

 

I stumbled upon digital scrapbooking when I was trying to figure out what to do with our wedding photos. I had no idea about physical scrapbooking even existed at the time! I put the album together in a couple weeks or less, and got it printed as a gift for our parents. After that, I didn't scrap for a while, but then I found one of the digi stores at the time (long gone), got hooked with the challenges, and have been scrapping steadily since 2008!! I've gone the reverse route, falling in love with digi first and then stamps, etc., and do a bit of everything now.


golden ticket #202510

 

I kissed the frog

 

I think I’ll have to do this on my computer tomorrow morning. My story is covering a couple of decades now. lol.

 

I think I have told my story before, but here goes again...
When I was about 13 years old a little scrapbooking store opened up in my town, Pebbles In My Pocket. If I understand correctly it was the first or one of the first brick and mortar stores dedicated just to scrapbooking. I think I had heard about it here and there... my sister-in-law and neighbor were stamping and making cards... and I had a box of baby and early childhood photos that my mom said I could put in a scrapbook. I would save my paper route money and ride my bike to the scrapbook store to buy paper, stickers, and of course those fun shaped scissors. I paper scrapbooked on and off through junior high, high school and college until it fizzled out - too expensive, and no space to store it!

In 2005 I had my first baby, and at the same time my sister-in-law's sister had started her own digital scrapbooking company. She made digital kits and sold them on CDs - this was pre-downloads! I was intrigued, and I really wanted to document my pregnancy and my new baby, so my sister-in-law taught me the basics of photoshop and I was hooked! I started with PSE 3.0 I think? And I used the same 10 kits over and over before I found other online digital scrapbooking sites. I have been fully digital since then - my baby is now 20 years old!

 

I set out attempting to be brief . . . a challenge, when my scrapping story is almost as old as I am (53) . . . If you don't have time, at least read the last paragraph.

1980 (age 9) I got my first diary, an ugly little green thing with a lock, which I still have, though the lock is long ripped out, and began my lifetime journaling habit.

1983 I began taping or gluing memorabilia into a plastic spiral-bound scrapbook (which I still have).

circa 1990 I began using 3-ring binders as scrapbooks. I punched holes in colored paper and attached tickets, funny things from magazines, etc. Plus I printed out calendars with Broderbund's Print Shop, on which I wrote events as a way of recording my life.

circa 2000 I noticed scrapbooking supplies in Michael's craft store and began making paper albums.

2005 In one of the several scrapbooking magazines I was reading at the time, I saw an ad for something new called "digital scrapbooking." Soon, with my husband's copy of Photoshop 5, I made this.


2006 The first new program I used to make digital layouts with Lumapix Fotofusion. But for my birthday in November, my husband gifted me with Photoshop Elements 5.

2007 I joined my first digiscrap forum, Scrapgirls, which would pretty much be my exclusive digiscrap home for about 4 years. I credit the owner and leaders there in those years with teaching me all my basic digiscrap skills and they are the reason my old kits are all broken into folders by kind (papers, buttons, tags, etc). It worked well back then, but I stopped doing that after I left Scrapgirls, when I wanted to try scrapping for hire.

early 2010's I joined numerous digiscrap forums, I created the name michelepixels, I attempted to start a scrap4hire business (I had about 2 orders), and I worked on several designers' and store teams, most memorably ScrapMatters. But that only lasted a few years because in 2012 I got super serious about learning photography and spent a lot of time at the Clickinmoms forum and CreativeLIVE, where I studied business.

2015 Starting to realize I don't actually want to be a business owner and that I'd only made about 10 scrapbook pages each of the last couple of years, I looked for a new digiscrap home. A long time favorite was ScrapOrchard, but I spent some time at the new Digital Press, which had the best forum platform but wasn't very active and Sweet Shoppe Designs.

2016 January When SO closed the previous month, I joined the migration to TLP, which I had discovered only at the beginning of 2015 and joined but didn't stick around then (and later wondered HOW did I not find the awesome place sooner???) 2016 MOC and the people in this forum made me want to stay here and it became my ONLY digiscrap home. Because by 2019 I was back to working outside the home and my kids were no longer wanting to be photographed, so I had less time and less mojo.

In this decade, I've been slowly learning that I DO want to keep scrapping, I have just had to learn a different way of scrapping. It was so easy when I was living an active life with growing homeschooled children, taking a hundred photos every week. Now I feel like I don't have enough time to myself and scrapbooking has sadly fallen a bit to the wayside. On the plus side, my annual albums are cheaper. Especially because in 2021 I switched to scrapping 8.5x11 and printing with Blurb's magazine format.

TLP is such a fun, active, and warm community, I think if I stopped scrapping I'd miss TLP more than scrapping or scrapbooks. Because since 2018, I've been journaling with the Day One app multiple times I day, recording my life more than ever before, with photos, video, text, audio, PDFs, and screenshots. Recording my life has always been the primary motivation for my scrapping, and Day One provides that better than anything else. But I do want to keep scrapping. I do want to have some pictures printed out. (You can print Day One journals but mine is way too huge to print and they don't offer any layout options.) So I envision keeping on hanging out here for many years to come, having fun with friends who also enjoy recording life, participating in the fun events, and every weekend planning to scrap, at least, even if it only ends up being once a month. And writing long posts that no one has time to read, but that's ok, because I will be copying and pasting this into my journal.

 

I tried to keep it to the highlights of how I came here, but it does cover 3 decades . . .

I began scrapbooking back in 1995 when my daughter was 3 years old and a friend/co-worker invited me to this thing called Creative Memories. I was hooked, I’d never really done anything like this, nor had my mom. Well, needless to say for any of you paper scrappers, papers, scissors, trimmers, stickers began to take on a prominent position in my household.

In late 2003 I got my first little point and shoot digital camera. (I actually still have it.) It came with PSE3. I started poking around to learn how to edit my photos. I was a big fan of sketches for my paper crafting. At some point, it seems like photo sizes moved from the standard 4 x 6 options. I started experimenting with cropping my photos in PSE. I figured out how to collage those sizes onto a 4 x 6 for printing. Then I would cut those out to scrap. At some point, I guess I got to a little bit of a “hybrid”, as I started doing a lot of my journaling and some titles on my computer and printing it onto cardstock to include on my paper pages.

I migrated to creating sketches on my computer, and even moving photos around on those sketches to see what I liked where. But I was still printing and paper scrapping. But, I was thinking about if this could somehow be a different way for me. However, I spent almost all of my working hours on a computer and I wasn’t sure I wanted my hobby to exist there too. I kept on paper scrapping until around 2008 when I created my first little digital project for my Mother-in-Law with photos of her little great-grandchildren. It was very basic, and I don’t recall if it used some sort of proprietary software with its own images. I poked around a bit, I remember finding Digital Scrapbooking site and lurking around that forum.

In 2009. I found Jessica Spraque’s site and signed up for classes on how to use PSE for digital scrapbooking. I was forever hooked. I even went to the first ever digital scrapbooking event hosted by Creating Keepsakes in 2009. I learned a lot there and met many of the peeps from Jessica’s site. It was there that I knew I wanted to switch from PSE to PS. (CS4 at that time.) (Funny, but they sent us home with what amounted to a suitcase full of paper scrapping "stuff".) There was no store at Jessica’s site at that time, I popped around a bit with my shopping and lurking. Eventually, she added a store, and I was on the site team which also supported learning PSE. I ended up getting a spot on Traci Reed’s creative team for 2013, but life got a little hectic after that and I didn’t continue on her team, but it was truly an awesome experience. I also was on the team at Simple Scrapper, using Jennifer Wilson’s templates and story prompts. I did that for several years and many of my early layouts here reflect the use of those. I helped out over at Tiffany Tillman’s teaching site too. Turns out, I really like helping people learn how to use these tools for their own creativity and storytelling. I bounced around across a few stores, but I was never really active anywhere after Jessica Sprague until I came to TLP. The first MOC I participated in was #3 in 2015. I never left.

So, over this 30 year scrapping history, my stories have changed from my own young family, to empty-nesting, to retirement, loss of a spouse, re-invention, and the joys I’m able to create with my grandson. There is a lot more art journaling in my repertoire these days. As a paper scrapper, I wanted to cram as many pictures as possible on the page, but now I’m happy with none, one, or just a few to tell the story or convey emotions.

 

These are so great to read!
I was never a scrapbooker growing up. I had a scrapbook in HS, but I mostly just shoved stuff in there that I wanted to keep. Fast forward to 2006...my kids are 15, 11, and 1, I'm a year into my second marriage to my graphic designer, Adobe Certified husband who had given me a copy of Photoshop CS2 to play around with. I was mostly just playing around with photos and when I asked him to show me how to do things, he told me to go look up tutorials That's how I stumbled upon digital scrapbooking. I think it was Scrap Girls where I saw my first tutorials. I posted my first layout online at Scrapbook Flair in August 2006. All of those pages are still there and they are baaaaaad lol. But that's where I landed my first CT. There are quite a few designer CTs and site CTs that I've been on over the years. At my peak, I think I was on 8 or 10 at one time. I was on teams for Lauren Reid and Cluster Queen Creations who both did collabs with Valorie Wibbens and that's how I landed here. First on Val's team in 2013 and then as a Polly in 2016. This has been home ever since.

 

I guess I could say I've scrapbooked most of my life only the early years were not what we consider scrapbooking. I would cut articles out of the newspaper and paste them into artist drawing pads of paper (nothing like they sell today). I documented engagements, weddings and a cousin's football career in college.

In 1996 I got a copy of Paint Shop Pro V. 4 on a diskette. I received monthly diskettes with programs you could try. No cost for the program and each of them were full featured. Another program I got that way was Family Origins which is now the program RootsMagic. I still use both of these programs to this day although I have upgraded versions of both of them! I found a website that taught classes on Paint Shop Pro so I took some. It had nothing to do with scrapbooking but taught how to create signatures using layers among other things. I learned how to scan photos using Paint Shop Pro and my scanner as well.

In 1999 I was invited to a Creative Memories party (sound familiar anyone?). I loved it so much I became a consultant just to get the discount on supplies. I still have some of my supplies (LOVE THE TRIANGLES) and if I do scrap a paper layout these days, those triangles and strips end up on them along with some of the sticker letters. I did buy some other products towards the end of my paper scrapping but I still used the basic CM formula for scrapping. No lumpy, bumpy stuff for me.

Around late 2007, somehow I found Digital Scrapbooking Place and then Scrap Girls and my digital scrapping days began. My first layout was created after Christmas 2007 and I started doing it more in 2008. I first collected supplies from a blog hop called "Trash to Treasure" that I stumbled upon in early 2008. All freebies and I used quite a few of them in my layouts but no longer have the actual files. I also found a blog by a template designer whose templates were my style from CM...Scrapping With Liz. I still have those early freebie layouts she had on her blog! Not sure when but the first store I remember frequenting was ScrapMatters. Then came Scrap Orchard. Like many others, I came here when Scrap Orchard closed since 4 of my favorite designers came here (Liz, Fiddle-Dee-Dee, Bella Gypsy and Kristin Aagard). I also signed up at Sweet Shoppe after SO closed. There were some other smaller stores during the years 2011 to 2014 and I was on CT's for several of the designers at one of them. But I found that CT work didn't really work for me so I gave them up.

In June of 2021, I signed up for a forum that focused on Paint Shop Pro to learn even more about the program to make my scrapping easier and faster. That forum is now having workshops on using Affinity since Paint Shop Pro is no longer being developed (it isn't going away but no new versions will be released) so I've started learning Affinity. But PSP is still my go to for scrapping.

My style of scrapping really hasn't changed much but I have learned to embrace clusters. I still don't like art journaling or mixed media. I'm more of a simple scrapper. In the end I scrap for me and very rarely upload layouts to the internet. I also go in spurts with my scrapping. Right now I'm not because I'm more focused on another project that I hope to have completed in a couple of weeks.

Of all the hobbies I have had over the years, scrapbooking is the one I have done the longest...25 years and counting.

 

I started with paper scrapping and still have way to much stuff! It's all Nolan's craft supply now! I use it occassionally, can't part with it, but can't use it all!
Then I started with digital when I found some free digital products in a scrapbook magazine with a cd! Yes a cd. I downloaded. But didn't really do much. Then I discovered Michaels had a program called MiDesign to make digital pages to create a printed book. I thought this was great, because I was pregnant, wanted to get caught up and thought this was it. I scoured the sites for freebies mostly at the beginning. My first real purchase was Nom Nom Nom by Valorie Wibbens and I used it to create Birthday decor my Nolan's first birthday themed the Very Hungry Caterpillar.

And it kind of all snowballed from there! TLP has been my first and favourite scrapping home!

 

Like @Lynnette I might have told this story before, and like @michelepixels 's story mine is as old as me (almost half a century). I was born in the Soviet Union, and we didn't have a lot, which translated into about a dozen photos that I had of my childhood and relatives. I learnt to read with the help of newspaper and before I learnt writing, my messages to family were like ransom notes... cut out from the same newspaper.
Then I took part in making a schoolpaper, documenting seemed like an important thing to me. I was making posters and presentations on large sheets of paper right into the University, and working as a teacher for a year. Then I met John and moved away to UK, and keeping things documented and keeping in touch started to mean even more to me, we even connected with John over a photograph I insisted on taking of him on his visit, so that one day his children (spoiler alert: those are mine too ) could look at his adventures and learn about how he lived before them. I took pictures from my teen years, when my Grandpa gave me his precious camera (really old film camera that I still have) and I used that and later a more modern version till the kids were 2 and 4 and we moved to Switzerland, where developing a film cost 10-12 ! times more than in UK... So I paid that (like 50 bucks for a single film) once not being prepared, and put the camera down. Paper scrapbooking also stopped then, as there were fewer possibilities and higher prices for the supplies. Luckily John knew how much documenting life meant to me and gave me a digital camera and a license for PSP for Christmas. The rest is history so to say, I was into digital scrapbooking within weeks.
Since then I took about a hundred pics a day and joined different scrapbooking communities, I seem to be fairly "monogamous" mostly hanging out in one particular place at a time, and it all started with SBB Scrapbookbytes, and then when that closed *I was by then helping behind the scenes I joined Scrapbookmatters, until the day it too closed, I have posted at Oscraps, and Sweet Shoppe on occasion, but since I've found the Lilypad and with Christa's nudge and inspiration got to do my first MOC, I have hardly strayed to another site at all. I appreciate the sheer luck that I have had with some of the most awesome designers over the years who asked me, or whom I begged to join the teams, and fun fact: most of them started with L. as in Lilypad and love: Laurie-Ann, Lynn Grieveson, Lynne-Marie, LBW and Amber Labau(for a while) and a lovely Gina

 

I am still in touch with a lot of the young moms that started scrapping around that time (my kids were a little bit older than most), and it is amazing to see their kids all grown up now!

 

My very first diary at age 9 was lime green with a lock! Thanks for sharing your journey with us!

 

THIS>>>>>>"However, I spent almost all of my working hours on a computer and I wasn’t sure I wanted my hobby to exist there too." That's really the main reason I laid off digiscrappingfor so long. Customer service taking 50-60 calls a day at a computer did not make me want to sit at a computer all evening. I need to get better about balancing getting out with coming home and scrapping, though.

 

I am SO glad I am away from that kind of work! So stressful!!!