Wednesday, November 12, 2008

A Fresh Take on an Old Hobby

I have to admit that one of the reasons for my lack of blogging, is that I’ve got a new hobby! Actually, it’s an old hobby reworked. I’ve been scrapbooking for about 12 years now. I used to scrap every Friday night at my local scrapbook store, but it closed almost a year ago and since then I’ve had very few opportunities to scrap. I don’t have the space for it at home and my church group only gets together once a month. Also, I’ve been losing my ‘mojo’. I needed something new and fresh, that I could do more easily at home. I found it!

A couple months ago when I went to my church scrap night, I had injured my back. I asked a friend to lift my heaviest bag out of the van for me but then I put everything else on my own shoulders. Yeah, stupid. Anyway, my back seized up and I almost ended up on the ground. It took half an hour for the muscles in my back to relax. As I was sitting there in a painful, awkward position, one of my friends arrived with her scrapbook stuff…a laptop. I had toyed with the idea of trying digital scrapping, but hadn’t yet been motivated enough to figure out how to start…until that night. I don’t have a laptop yet, but I do have photoshop on my computer at home, so I started to learn how to use it for digital scrapping. I found out that there are so many places on the web that you can download FREE digital kits. I was like a kid in a candy store! I love it! I enjoy scrapping again.

My church group had been planning our first scrap retreat. It was coming up in late October. So I worked on getting a good portfolio of kits and had it all organized. When the retreat came, all I had to bring was my computer! There were 3 other digital scrappers there besides myself. It’s a new age of scrapping! (my behemoth monitor did look a little silly next to their laptops, but I didn’t care!) We had 17 people at the retreat and we had a great time. I can’t wait to go again next year. Eventually, I’ll have a laptop….

Here are a few of the digi-pages I’ve created. I’m still learning: