It Lowers My Blood Pressure...

By:Cathy Gray

I have been scrapbooking for about six years now and am the proud owner of 15 completed albums. Scrapbooking has certainly changed over the years. My first layout consisted of about twenty tiny pictures (no mats) and a few tiny stickers "sneezed" onto the page. Recently, I was challenged by the book "Simple Scrapbooking" which encouraged scrapbookers to go beyond the simple documentation of events i.e. Christmas, birthdays etc. and move onto telling about your hopes and dreams, your routines, and to somehow "find a way to truly capture the essence of your family." So I am now excitedly working on 2 different types of scrapbooks for this year. One I am calling "301 Things that Make Me Smile" and the other- "Advice to My Children's Children”. Until now, if you were to look at my scrapbooks you would never know my children had a mom. That will change as I complete these two albums.

It helps to not be a perfectionist when scrapbooking. (Recently I made a beautiful layout titled Happy 4th Birthday! Opps it happened to be her third. No problem just mark through it and get a good laugh. It also helps not to worry about your pages being publish worthy. Do you like it? That's good enough. My biggest inspiration comes from meeting with my friends and cropping each month and checking on posts here at dmarie.

Why do I love scrapbooking? That's an easy one. I know it lowers my blood pressure at least ten degrees. It shows my children I love them and am very proud of them. It is an entirely wholesome activity. It creates smiles as the star looks at his or her page. And it preserves memories that would otherwise be totally lost. You pay big bucks for a vacation it doesn't have to be over within a week. If you scrapbook you can enjoy it for years and years to come!


Tomorrow at dMarie Daily: Thank you, dMarie!, by bennie, Murray, UT