Digital Scrapbooking. My DIL scrapbooks. She had a Creative Memories Party a couple of years ago and I went and bought some supplies thinking I would start a Family Heritage album....and I did start, but stalled because 1) I wasn't happy with the results (as it turns out, it was the Creative Memories method I didn't like) and 2) I didn't like "pasting" original old family pictures in the album.

I could have done one of the grandkids, but DIL had that one sewn up, and very nicely. So, when I realized I had a lot of momentos stored up from Clay concerts, I started a scrapbook with that theme. Did one for 2004 and one for 2005. I like them, they are great reminders of wonderful trips and people I met.

I had already been creating some of my "embellishments" on the computer, but one day I picked up a magazine on digital scrapbooking and I don't think I'll be going back to the conventional, physical way. Here's why:

1) Your pictures and/or pages are truly "archival". If you store them on the internet, or archive them on CD's or DVD's, they will last forever. I don't care how "archival" scrapbook paper is supposed to be, the books are much more vulnerable than digital scrapbooks.

2) With digital scrapbooks, they can be shared with all family members - and golly, even complete strangers who drop in to my blog or website. If you do a physical scrapbook, you only have one...and it likely will get shabby with repeated viewings.

3) Digital scrapbooking for my Family Heritage allows me to scan an old photo and put the originals away for safekeeping. I highly recommend, even if you aren't going to scrapbook your old pictures, that you scan them and store them on disk. Mine date back to tintypes and they are fading. I can see a huge difference over the past 25 years. Another thing I highly recommend is to write in pencil on the back of the picture who is in the picture. Your kids aren't going to remember.

So, with all that to ponder over, I did a page this morning using a picture I liked of my grandaughter spitting. Basically, what you need to do is pick a paper - like this one -

then you add your picture



(clickable)

and some more embellishments

and this is the result.



(click on picture)


Next post I will add some links for internet sites that will help you get started. These sites have freebies to download, kits you can purchase, help pages, message boards, and galleries of scrapbooking pages MUCH better than mine to use for ideas. I recommend Photoshop Elements, Digital Image Suite or Paint Shop Pro software. There are programs dedicated to scrapbooking, I am not too familiar with any of them, but my gut feeling is they don't allow you to be as creative - in otherwords, they offer you templates and you plop your pictures in.

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