Paperclipping: The Video Podcast | Design Your Story

A lot of you said after reading Part 1 that you feel better about yourselves having seen my first pages. I was a late bloomer. And just so you know, many of the layouts I’ll be showing you in in this post were the best of their time, or layouts that mark a next-step for me.

Getting It Done Layouts

The next phase of my scrapbooking was a long stagnation. I was busier with a second child and it seems a lot of what I did was an effort to just get it done. Because I didn’t have many supplies I was spending more time hand-writing and hand-cutting designs or letters and most of my pages look like the one above but with even less to them. They were 2-page layouts with lots of photos spread around.

Having a second child spurred me toward more journaling. With two young children developing quickly I realized I had to get those memories recorded. Now you see more stories and pictures on each page, but less decorating.

Time wasn’t the only factor, though. We moved into a house much farther away from the local scrapbook store, we no longer had extra money to spend, and for a long while we shared one car, which Israel took to work. There were a number of years when I was using only leftovers and was missing out on all the changing and development that I would have seen in the stores and magazines if had looked.

Maybe this is why I began to have some moments of rebellion, when I decided to use some of the actual pieces of our lives in place of acid-free industry products…

I love this page, even if I would lay it out differently now and add more colors. Seeing these Einstein images reminds me of a great time when we were going to Einstein Bagels every Sunday morning and then off to the Scottsdale Civic Center to visit the library, read books on the grass, and play by the fountains.

Experimenting With Lumpy Products

One year I got some birthday money and decided to spend it all on scrapbooking products at two of our local stores. Not having been in a scrapbook store in a while, I remember being shocked that the industry had undergone a huge change while I was gone.

I didn’t dare spend my birthday money on magazines so I was ignorant about who initiated the changes and what other people were doing with these new products. And still had no clue about design concepts.

You can see that with after that shopping trip I was back to experimenting with design, colors, and products again, but I had a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction at this time. I wondered if my products were a distraction to the pictures. Understanding design principles would have really helped me.

Learning Through Trial And Error

This surge of new products inspired me to spend more time on my layouts again and I can see where this new attention to details helped me improve my design instinctively. Notice the new use of lines in the last three layouts, including the anchoring line I added to the bottom row of photos in this Thanksgiving layout. They’re still not great but I was learning from my experiences. It’s interesting to see the that I was starting to get an idea of some design elements, even if I didn’t fully get it or know that’s what I was doing.

Scapbooking more sophisticated topics also allowed me to play more with the types of products and colors I like (as opposed to child-themed ones). I can’t help giggling at my tiny dolphins compared to the giant shells and the glue dots visible through the velum. What I do like is that I was starting to find and identify colors I love.

My CM Phase

Most scrapbookers say they started out with Creative Memories and then moved away from it. I didn’t touch CM until I’d already been scrapbooking for six or seven years. I met a consultant who had a fireball personality and she inspired me to start journaling a lot more. For a short time I stopped buying other industry products and purchased mainly from CM.

While I have a lot pages with the older CM look (solid white background with triangles in the corner and from the sides), I usually tried hard for an aesthetically pleasing look. While working on the layout above about Aiden, I distinctly remember my excitement of discovering compartmentalized spaces, using lines, eye direction, and carrying a circular theme from one side to the other.

How Making Cards Made Me Aware of Myself

I also started making cards with my friends using Stampin’ Up products. I wanted to send a homemade card to a friend from high school but none of the cards I’d been making were really me. I couldn’t get myself to send any of them to her. That’s when I first became aware that I was rarely scrapbooking in a way that really reflected me. I wondered if that even was possible. I think you can see that new thought reflected in the last layout and the next few below.

I had so much fun mixing these unlikely pattens together (three different sizes of squares from punched scraps)–something I continue to love doing today.

These muted colors and patterns were so me back then, and still are now.

It was around this time in 2005 that Israel asked me to do something which led to the next big jump in my journey toward personal style. Stay tuned…(But go ahead and leave your observations by commenting).