Closing the Book on 2006

I’ve finished scrapbooking 2006 and will be starting my 2007 album soon. As I finished last year’s pages, I realized how much my scrapbooking has changed in the last six years or so since I started documenting our lives this way.  I used to create very involved, time- and labor-intensive layouts with a lot of handmade elements. Now, my scrapping revolves around photos, journaling, colored and patterned background papers and a few thematically chosen die cuts or other embellishments.

Why the change? I think my focus has shifted. I remember scrapping those very elaborate layouts and talking with other scrapbookers about how irrelevant it was to be scrapping the current year’s photos. But now that I have many years of completed books to look back on and cherish, I realize the value of these pages isn’t in the artwork - it’s in the completion.  Intricate designs can be beautiful, but if they keep me from completing my books, they defeat my purpose for scrapping altogether, which is to preserve our memories and all the things that are special to us. 

For me, simple scrapbooks are best.