Scrapbooking Saturday

Back in May, Lori and I had a fabulous trip to Vegas where we crammed into 4 days what most people would do in a week or more. We wanted to preserve our memories and decided to each build a scrapbook of the occasion. I had created a previous scrapbook on a car journey from Arizona to Virginia and the album had cost me around $400 to complete. Because Lori and I knew our Vegas books would be in a similar price range, if not more, we decided to get together once a month or so and spend a day scrapping and/or shopping together for supplies.
Today we spent 9 hours working on them and each created just 3 pages, one of which we're each holding in the above photo. You have to understand that we're not regular scrappers. Most scrapbooks comprise of an album with plastic sleeves into which a decorated page is placed. I've seen some beautiful layouts in magazines and at shows, but we both felt that they were a little 'flat' and therefore we are creating 'touchy feely' albums. We won't insert our pages into sleeves because our pages are built to create textures so you can touch everything. We use literally anything that can be stuck down on a page that isn't too heavy, be it plastic, metal, glass, wood, fabric, anything. The pages are then mounted onto firm acetate, the holes reinforced with eyelets and homemade paper dividers placed between each page to protect the contents.


This is a close up of Lori's page using embellishments, ribbon and brads with flocked and glitter paper. Why should that be contained behind plastic when as soon as you see it you want to touch it?
Admittedly, 9 hours is a long time to spend creating just 3 pages each but 1.5 hours was first spent shopping with lots of 'oohs' and 'aahs' in AC Moore's and a bill of $50 each. Then when sitting at the table, up to another hour is spent unpacking and carefully placing everything away in it's appropriate folder/container, followed by careful selection of a base sheet and trying to color coordinate. Admittedly, some of this time is spent staring into space, scratching one's head, shuffling paper, or just looking blankly at eachother until a flow is established.


The above image is a close up of my page, showing eyelets, embellishments, brads and decorated acetate.
So far, we've only created about 9 pages each for our albums which will include a total of 24 pages, so we still have many more hours of work left yet, but it's great fun and very satisfying to review our efforts at the end of each session. Scrap on, sister, scrap on!