The Shabby Shoppe

   I have always been a lover of scrapbooking and creative crafty projects. From my childhood days of Christmas and craft boutiques with my mom, to doodling and creating cards in high school, to scrapbooking through my many years as an employee at the amazing Crackerjack Too! Scrapbook Co. in Redlands.

   After I became a teacher, I found myself pouring any available creativity I had into setting up my home and my classroom. I stopped scrapbooking all together, and whenever I tried to pick it back up again, it was like an athlete who hadn’t played in awhile-and went out for a quick pick me up game with buddies. I was out of practice, and by the time I had everything out, set-up, and had decided what project to tackle first…it was time to clean it all up and go back to work, or whatever other priorities took precedence at the time.

   I remember when digital scrapbooking first came about. I was a die-hard “old-school” scrapper, and I was determined that digital scrapbooking was unauthentic and one-dimensional and fake. Not “real” scrapbooking. There wasn't that creative, handmade feel to it.  To be honest, at the time, some of my judgments were partially true because there weren’t many available resources for Digi-Scrapping, and the ones that DID exist were in their infancy stage and just barely developing product.

   So, I postponed my creative hobby for a few more years, and decided that I would get back to it when “I had time”. Ya, like when I get to heaven. My sister continued to inspire me with her cute mini-books, and collage boards and various scrapbook crafts. But, I knew I was the Queen of unfinished projects, and I still had countless amounts of unused scrapbooking supplies from my years of “working in the biz”, and I just didn’t want to get in the middle of another unfinished project. So, I stuck to little projects. Did I finish any of those…nope.

Years passed, and in November of 2009, I was pregnant (very pregnant) with Ellie, and visiting my sis-in-law’s family for my niece’s birthday party. My sis-in-law’s sister (got that) was there visiting from Texas, and she had brought along her latest book of her oldest daughter’s 1^st year-created using a Digital Scrapbook kit and an online book binding company.

   I was mesmerized! I seriously couldn’t focus on anything else! Here I was at my precious niece’s birthday party, and I couldn’t stop looking at the book, and asking tons of questions, and trying to memorize every detail of every page. It was stunning! A masterpiece! She had basically created a hardback book that had pictures and journaling documenting all of the important events, stories, memories and joys of the 1^st year of her daughter’s life. It was so awesome!

   I was immediately hooked! She graciously copied some of the free kits that she downloaded off of her favorite site, the Shabby Shoppe, and burned them to a disk for me to try at home. You would have thought it was my MY birthday! I eagerly went home, popped the disk in, and then realized I had to have the software to use the kits. So, I downloaded a 30 trial of Photoshop Elements, and figured that would give me enough time to play around and determine if this was really something I would commit to and be interested in. The software would be an initial investment-but other than that, I had plenty of kits to keep me busy for awhile, and the only real cost would be ordering each book.

I had found the perfect thing to keep my mind occupied until Ellie was due to arrive about a month later.

   Needless to say, I LOVE IT! It’s wonderful to scrapbook digitally because it’s all self-contained in your computer! You just complete each page, save it, and then upload the finished product to the online printing company of your choice, and VOILA!

   So, here are a few examples of the pages I have worked on for Ellie’s 1^st book. I stared it before she was born, and then the reality of being a new mom set in, and I had to put it off for a few months. But, I’m almost finished, and am so excited to order the finished book.

I can’t take credit for these pages. I went onto the Shabby Shoppe's gallery, and basically mimicked pages that I thought were cute-as it can be a little overwhelming to create a layout completely from scratch at first. Plus, I had to get used to the Photoshop software too.