Digital Scrapbooking

I was quite excited yesterday, when I received my new book from Heritage Makers. This book is all about our holiday last spring, when we stayed out in Radium for the week. Here's the digital version from when I worked on it online.
* Click on " Full Screen" to see it better, if you'd like.



I've recently entered the world of digital scrapbooking. I still sometimes prefer to scrapbook the traditional way, to dig out all the papers and embellishments, but sometimes going digital has advantages.

Here's the top reasons for going digital...

1. No mess. No cluttered table I never seem to clean up. (okay, I have a cluttered table in my basement, but I'm not adding to it....)

2. No left over extra photos that I ended up not using in my scrapbook. I don't know what other people do, but when I scrapbook, I usually print off most of my pictures and then decide which ones I want to scrapbook. I don't think that far ahead and decide exactly which ones I want before I print them.

3. All my pictures can be the size I want and cropped the way I want them. Like I mentioned before, I print out all my pictures before hand. Then, my pictures are all 4x6. No variation unless I cut and crop them. And I never have larger pictures. Which I find I like when I do it digitally.

4. My finished project is less bulky. No embellishments that stick out from the page. And it doesn't weigh a ton!

5. It's easy to share my finished project and get duplicates made for others.

Hmmmm. Sounds like there's a lot going for the digital scrapbooking. But, there's something to be said about traditional scrapbooking. Something about the 3D visual that's missing from digital. If you're a scrapbooker, you know what I mean. There's a time and a place for both types of scrapbooking. I'll probably continue to do both.

Along with my Radium book, I also finished another book in February that I'm still waiting to get in the mail. This book is for my brother, Scott.
When Scott passed away unexpectedly in 2009, I knew I wanted to make a book in remembrance. I started about 6 months after his passing, but found that working on his book was extremely difficult. Looking at all his pictures and knowing there would be no more, was extremely hard to wrap my head around. He was too young to be gone. Also, probably even more upsetting to me, was the fact that I realized I had very few memories of my own of my brother. Scott was 10 years older, so I don't have any childhood memories of him and then as an adult, our lives were so completely different, we still rarely saw each other. So few memories and it makes me so sad now.

I would set deadlines for when I wanted to finish Scott's book. Those deadlines would come and then they would go by. I'd set a new one and it too, would come and go. So, in the beginning of February, I set what I would hope to be my final deadline. The end of February. I wanted to be finished. I requested my family to help with all the stories and journaling. Everyone contributed in some way or another and I was able to finish it on February 28th. I'm glad this project is done. I think I shed a tear or two, just about every time I worked on it. A much harder project than I expected.
Thank you to my family, for helping me finish by telling me all your memories of Scott and allowing me to put them in my book.
So, going along with my #5 reason why digital is good.... Scott's book is being made for several of us, not just me.

Here's a little look at Scott's book.