My new hobby

I have never been much of a scrap booker and I have never claimed to be a very creative person. But since having a baby I have thought it important to take a lot of pictures. Now having a digital camera has its perks and its setback. It is great because with babies it often takes like 20 shots to get a good one. The darn rascals won't sit still and rarely smile on cue. And my kid seems to be camera shy. You pull a camera out in front of her and she freezes (and not in a sense that she sits still). However, as it turns out – I then acquire about 20 shots of her doing essentially the same thing. Being a doting mother – I can’t always decide which picture I like best – so I have a hard time erasing them. Then the pictures build up and just sit in the computer, only to be viewed when the screensaver comes on and it’s a slide show of all my pictures. My sister-in-law who is an avid picture taker and scrapbooker doesn’t like digital cameras and refuses to convert. She says digital pictures never get printed and that you lose the suspense of turning in a roll of film and wondering if any pictures turned out. Also, that you lose some of those great candid shots.

Anyway, back to my new hobby. So, I have all these pictures and nothing to do with them. I have friend who has a website for her family that shows off all these amazing Digital Scrapbook pages that she made. When I saw it, I thought “hey maybe I could do that and not have to buy all the scrapbooking crap and cut out pictures and junk”. So, during the summer, I started surfing the net to learn what I could about digital scrapbooking. Now, I am not one of those people that enjoys learning by reading. I mean, I like to read but when it comes to gaining a new skill, particularly a creative undertaking such as learning photoshop, I would much rather learn by someone showing me. Unfortunately, I didn’t know anyone to show me – so I just plugged away at tutorials online. I mostly gave up, because I didn’t have the time or energy to figure it out on my own. Then several months later, I decided for Christmas I would make my mother-in-law a calendar. So, I plugged away learning to use Photoshop and learning to be creative.

I discovered that I am addicted. I made our Christmas card on photoshop, and then volunteered myself to do two of my sister’s Christmas card. Now any spare moment I get (which is on Sunday during naptime) I want to play on the computer to create a new page. Now, I am far from being very good at this, but I am having fun. And maybe someday I will print these pages and have an actual scrapbook. So, here are a few pages and I am sure I will post more as I create them.
July Page for the Calendar.













September Page for the Calendar