How scapbooking changed my life

By:Abby Ross

Has scrapbooking changed my life? Has scrapbooking changed my life???
In ways other than having my charge card maxed out, you mean?

I suppose the first change I notice is the accumulation of a vast amount of stuff related to scrapbooks. I’ve had to find a way to store paper and a place to keep it. I’ve rearranged book cases and closets. I’ve organized and found years of old photographs. I’ve had to find a place to put up a card table in my room. (I couldn’t very well adopt the dining room table, since I kicked my husband off of it a few months ago when I decluttered the house.)

Finding a place for everything has been even more challenging than coming up with ideas to use for pages, because scrapbookers seem to acquire so many things. If I were to give new scrapbookers one piece of advice, it would be don’t go out and buy everything you see within the first few weeks. I have stickers and scissors that I will never use that I got in those first few weeks when I was so excited about everything related to scrapbooking. I do most of my work now with card stock, Hermafix adhesive, a plain pair of scissors, a couple of pens and lots of photographs.

And speaking of photographs, even though I have always been an avid photographer, I take far more pictures than I used to, and I carry a camera with me at all times.

Finally, I believe that scrapbooking makes you look at the world differently, more carefully. I cannot drive down the highway now and not think of taking a photograph. When my older daughter and younger daughter are working together on music, or just clowning, I grab the camera, knowing that it is a memory that they, and I, will want to keep.

I find myself thinking more carefully about my place in the world, and what people, a hundred years or more from now, might want to know about us.

I also think more about my ancestors and what I wish they had passed on to me, so that I can be sure that my great-grandchildren have what I so wish I did.

Scrapbooking has given me a new world view, an new outlook on my own and my children’s lives.
But then, there’s that maxed out charge card, which I don’t think will be going away for a while.

Tomorrow at dMarie Daily: My new friends, by susan wilson