My First Pages

I'm trying to figure out which blog site I want to use to do my blog. My original blog was www.ericascraps.wordpress.com but I found the site a little confusing to use so I'm giving this one a try. 

I started scrapbooking again about a year ago and I want to document the changes in how I do things and hopefully show how I've improved. I'm optimistic that through changes in my processes, more attention to detail, and more options in supplies my layouts will improve and I'll be less and less embarrassed that my work isn't as good as all the other scrapbook layouts I see out there,

As a frame of reference these are the first 3 pages I did when I started back up. I was making a scrapbook of myself, my sister (Sam), and my cousin (Jillian) so I put together a page for each of us that included all of our elementary and high school yearbook photos that I could find and were each done in our individual favorite colors’. They came out with varying degrees of success, with my page of course coming out the worst LOL.

My Page: This is the first one I did, it’s my own photos and of course it’s in blue, which you will notice from many of my other layouts, is my absolute favorite color.

This is of course; me. Ta da!

I’m not all that happy with the paper choices on this one, but in my defense this was very early in my scrapbooking career. At the time I was very limited in paper choice and even more limited in those in the blue spectrum. I didn’t measure anything before I cut it and I didn’t have plan on how I wanted it to look before I started sticking everything on the page. I like dragonflies so I randomly stuck some stickers haphazardly on there and mostly it looks like I had no idea what I'm doing. As you can see it’s pretty awful; on the positive side there is plenty of room for improvement.

Samantha: This is the second one I did and it’s for my sister who loves the color pink.

My little Sammy Girl

I like this one better. I actually did a basic sketch before I started this one. I still didn’t measure anything or even attempt to mark it off on the page where I wanted everything to go, however the use of the sketch definitely improved the final product. I chose a “circle” theme for this one, which I think may actually have come out better if I’d put some kind of outline around so they would be better defined. I’m not a fan of the baby picture stuck down on the bottom because it looks just haphazardly stuck on, which is pretty much the case because I didn’t spend much time figuring out where I wanted to put things on the page; in fact I hadn’t even counted the number of images I was going to include. This wouldn’t be such a big problem except that I actually started gluing images down before I’d even worked out the layout of the page. I created the name tag myself with a piece of cardstock, markers, and sticky jewels (as I post more pages you will notice my love of all things glittery and sparkly). I think this page is a definite improvement on the first.

Jillian: Cousin Jill loves green and I love her page.

Jumping Jilly Beans

I’m not sure if it was her color choice or just the fact that I chose a better theme but this one is my favorite of the three, and even still manages to be one of my favorite pages even though I have improved my process. Again I did a layout sketch for this one, the difference being that I learned my lesson about adhesion and on this one I laid everything out before I started gluing away. I also used paper-piecing patterns from ScrapbooksEtc. I got the tulips here and thebutterflies here. I used sticky jewels to map the butterflies flight path and while I think it gets the point across I think I should have used smaller sized jewels and put the pattern closer together to make it look more obvious. The bottom green piece is another place for improvement because again I didn’t measure out the piece to make sure it was straight across and when I discovered my error instead of cutting a new piece (which I didn’t do because I was unemployed at the time and didn’t want to waste the paper because I couldn’t afford much) I tried to disguise the crookedness by cutting waves into the paper. It sounds like I’m down on it but I’m not, like I said I love this page, imperfections and all.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate it more than you know!