EXPRESS SCRAPBOOKING

Scrapbook Express

I was a day late posting (first time ever in over a year) last week.....partly because I was working on this week's offering.
We had a weekend in Melbourne and rather than consign the photos to the "Gunnadoo" pile I decided to do something with them straight away.  I'm not at avid scrapbooker but quite like the concept of mini albums which in my household are more likely to be looked through than 12 x 12 epic productions.
Luck (good or bad I'm not sure which) would have it that I only took my little pocket camera with me and somehow in re-setting the light sensitivity I also changed the image quality to small.....no more that about four inches at 300dpi.  That meant I didn't have to agonize about appropriate sizing - basically everything was edited to 2 x 3, 2 x 2 or 3 x 3 (inches). This also made layouts simple as the pages were cut to fit these sizes  I used textured ivory off-cuts. I kept to a simple colour scheme - ivory, black, red and silver.  As the aim was to undertake this project  immediately while events were fresh in my mind and before it became just another thing on the "to do" pile I decided to try and finish within a week (bearing in mind I work full-time so we are talking evenings).  As a consequence rather than play around with fancy binding I made a template to ensure that all the holes were cut  in the same place and simply punched a hole in the corner of all the pages and fixed them together with a screw post.  I used my Cuttlebug to die-cut the front page title but other than that all the rest of the journalling was handwritten.  (This was actually the biggest challenge as I always feel that my writing is never neat enough even although intellectually I know that this is not the point).  I used my score board to score lines onto ivory card before writing so that I could keep the text more or less straight and I didn't ruin a whole page if I made a mistake. I cut most of the journalling blocks with a 2 inch square hole punch.  
Everything that would fit went onto the pages- over 100 photos, footy and movie tickets, boarding passes etc and yes......it was finished withing the week!!!  It won't win any prizes for neatness or originality and I won't be bringing it out to show the visitors........but I didn't make it for them.  In 10 years time hopefully I
can browse through the pages and remember a really lovely weekend away.  So my advice to myself is don't always put it away until I have time........JUST DO IT!!