...And So It Begins

Where to start? I guess introductions are in order. My name is Sean, and I like to scrapbook. There, I said it. I'm a guy who likes to scrapbook.

Over the course of my life I have tried (and failed) to keep a journal. The desire has always been there, at least a little bit, but I just could never bring myself to write on any sort of consistent basis. I had my best success at it during my two year LDS mission, when I had actual time set aside in my day to do so. But since then it seems like I just haven't taken the time to do it.

After I was first married (22 years and counting), I noticed that my wife had some big three-ring binders filled with pictures of her growing up, glued onto pastel colored cardstock with some stickers here and there decorating the page, and with little squares of typewritten text to explain the pictures or that told a story. I thought this was a novel concept, having grown up in a family that didn't take a ton of pictures, and the ones we did have were in a pile at the bottom of a drawer some place. And if we were really lucky those photos might have somthing written the back of the photo to give some idea of who was in it, or a year (often not both).

So, as I would get film developed (yep, that was a thing back in those days), I began to mimic the scrapbooks my wife had. I scrapbooked in the only way I knew how: used decorative scissors to cut around the pictures, used stencils and magic markers to make "cool" looking titles for the pages, and put stickers on freaking everything!

It's like I was trying to recreate a postage stamp or something!

I couldn't even write in a straight line! And what's with the microscopic stickers?

Decorative scissors? Check! Mrs. Grossman stickers? Check! Crappy journaling and random die cuts? Check and check!

In the late 90s, I actually got a job working at Pebbles in My Pocket, a store that at the time focused on paper scrapbooking. There I was introduced to other scrapbooking styles and materials, like die-cuts, acid free products, multi-colored (not just pastels) cardstock, vellum, and double-sided tape in every width imaginable. And a whole new creative world opened up to me!

I was cutting out around people and layering photos like a mad man! And oy, the journaling.

This is what you did the days before panoramic photos: take three and stitch them together and hope for the best. I think the magic marker stenciled title adds just the right touch. ;)

Since you couldn't see your pictures until after they were developed, you just had to live with those blurry ones!

It was around this time that my scrapbooking style made a major shift. I began to create pages that took me literally hours to create. I would often matte (sometimes even double or triple matte) photos onto cardstock. I traced and cut out thousands of letters and words with an Exacto knife, using just about every style letter stencil Pebbles sold. And I accumulated box after box of "designer" paper, every color cardstock imaginable, and punches of every shape and size. Thankfully, I lost the desire to decoratively cut out my photos with Deckle scissors!

Oh yeah, there's some triple matte action going on here!

Remember when "tearing" was all the rage? I went through that phase, too!

In what world does mounting letters in this fashion make it easy to read? Props to me for trying to find an ink color for journaling that matched the page, though.

Even thought I was making plenty of pages, shoving them into page protectors, and filling binders, my biggest weakness was always the journaling, which is weird because I love to write. But I didn't love my handwriting so I'd leave space on the page for the "stories", but more often than not, would never come back to it. Or I'd purposely make the page with a big decorative title, and leave it at that.

Oh, there's a really cute story that goes along with these pictures....I just didn't tell you what it was.

Who are all these people, what occasion was this? If I were to die tomorrow, nobody would know!

I tried to type something up on the computer and then print it out meaning to glue it into the open space on the page. Yeah right! Looking through old albums now, I can't even tell you how many pages have little scraps of paper journaling just floating in the page protector (in a totally 90s font no less).

After a while, the page making seriously stalled. Dozens of pages depicting the birth and first fews years of my oldest's life (you know, the "all-but-the-journaling" pages), and then number two comes along five years later, and ......nothing! It just wasn't worth the hassle to pull out all the supplies, work on a page for hours, and then have a single page to show for it. And then the daunting task and drudgery of having to put everything away.

So the next phase of "scrapbooking" started. Get the pictures developed (still the olden days, folks) and putting those photos into sheet protectors right from the photo lab. No journaling, no labeling, just a bunch of photos, four to a page, in binders.

I've got a whole 3-inch binder full of pages like this...

Then came the age of digital cameras. I filled up disk after disk and drive after drive with photos that I was "going to print someday." When I did get them printed, they promptly just went in a box, or if I was lucky, a manilla folder actually labeled with a year.

When cellphone cameras became a thing (though it would still be a few years down the road before I had a smartphones with a really good camera). I had finally discovered how to save photos onto my computer, so the organization process was a little bit improved, but still the pictures were just on the screen and not in a book...I still didn't want the mess, but I wanted those pictures seen and the stories behind them told.

Then I found out that my friend Becky Higgins has started her own scrapbooking company a few years prior and had made scrapbooking "doable" again. The idea was intriguing. Just print your pictures and slide them into pockets, add some pre-designed journaling cards and BAM, done. No glue, no scissors, no problem. Could it really be that easy?

I still hesitated to begin another round of starting over. To be honest, I didn't love the card kits that Project Life started out with. I'm a guy with two sons, and didn't have a whole lot of room for pink, purple, and flowery in my life. Plus we were living on a teacher's budget and couldn't justify the expense of a physical scrapbooking program (especially since we still had tons of supplies from previous years unused). So I was quietly happy for Becky and her growing company, and loved the idea of the simplicity of it all, but didn't join the bandwagon.

Until....

The Project Life App. Talk about a breath of fresh air! It was 2014 when I first heard about it and by this time I had a smartphone and had fully become one of the billions of people using that as their sole picture taking device. The Project Life app made it so simple to quickly take a picture on my phone, plug it into a pre-designed digital layout, pick some fillers cards from a much better variety of sets, and add some quick journaling to finish up the page, all in the palm of my hand!

I think I officially became hooked when I was on a work trip to NYC, and had decided that my first officially "big city adventure" would be to see the city from the top of the Empire State Building. So I went on the tour, took some pictures of the skyline, leaned over the side and took pictures of the street below, took some selfies from the 84th floor, you know, all the "touristy" photos. And as I rode the elevator back down to the ground level, I completed (with journaling even) my first Project Life app page.

On. The. Elevator. Ride. Down. A complete page, DONE! Could it really be this simple? Yep, it was. and I've never looked back.