The Joy of Scrapbooking!

On Sunday I remembered why I’m a digiscrapper.

It was a simple premise – I need to decorate 2 8x8 pages for a little project I’m working on. Now with real difficulty it would have taken about twenty minutes on my computer – in real life? About 5 hours!

But it’s simple I hear you say. Yep it is – if you’re one of those organised scrappers who knows where everything’s kept, not when you’re me with your stash buried down the back of the sofa (amongst many other places).

Step 1 – choose your papers. I needed 4 different papers – easy enough you would think except that it meant moving EVERYTHING from behind the sofa to find it. Even Arnie would have had trouble lifting some of my boxes of papers – God knows how I got them down there but they’re not coming back up again without me doing some serious injury to my back!

Step 2 – cut to size. Okay – so I’ve lost my paper cutter. Nope I found it but the blade needs replacing. So I find the scalpel. Unfortunately the blade needs replacing in that too. And I can’t find a cutting mat or my steel edged ruler for love nor money. So finally I dig out the scissors and cut by hand – it’s a bit wonky but it’ll do. It’s made with love after all!

Step 3 – rounding the pages. Yep you guessed it can’t find my CM corner rounder anywhere, although I know I saw it somewhere earlier but I do have 2 Dovecraft ones (no longer - they are now in the bin where I should have thrown them the last time I realised they were completely crap). So I’ve ruined a perfectly cut page with a crappy corner rounder and realise I have no choice I have to find the CM one or not bother with rounded corners.

Step 4 – cut the embellishments. These are simple and fairly plain pages so I only have a few hole punched embellishments in different papers. I wanted to do circles but find I don’t have a circle hole punch bigger than a pinhead, so okay I’ll change everything and go for hearts (the only thing of the size I need).

Step 5 – stick it all together. Well I’ve lost my herma. I can find various refills but not the actual unit. I don’t want to use double sided tape in case I need to move anything around later. Hurrah my first piece of good luck my Xyron X sticker thing is somewhere where I can see it straight away AND joy of joys it has repositionable glue. Brilliant! I can stick my embellishments on my page.

But now it’s looking a little bare – I don’t have any suitable titles etc. and not quite sure what it should say anyway at the moment so instead I decide to add a couple of extremely heavy plaques (those metal ones by Making Memories)

Step 6 – add the metal. They have eyelets on the back so need to be set. Of course I do still have my Provocraft Silent Setter but to my mind it’s even more useless than the Dovecraft corner rounders so don’t even bother trying to find it. What I need is my trusty setting kit and a big hammer. Of course I can’t find my MM toolkit which has all those wonderful things but I do have a setter hanging around and strangely there’s a little pick hammer down the side of my freezer (don’t ask why). No mat though and so I have to bang it into the table (fortunately about a million years old) leaving a couple of nice holes in it.

So my pages are finally done. And I can’t yet show them, but as soon as I can I’ll post them so you can see how much trouble went into such little outcome.

I’m seriously considering selling all my stash and going purely digital – it’s much easier and quicker to do and all the kits can be stored on my external HDD taking up no space whatsoever!