Family Concerns

When we think of scrapbooking, often times we think of layouts that focus on holidays, weddings, births and special events in our lives that we want to preserve. These are days that bring smiles to our faces and laughter to our hearts. As natural as this may be to choose such occasions for our scrapbooking themes, sometimes we miss out on an experience to use our creative outlet to express our thoughts and feelings about those difficult moments in our lives that are inevitable.

When we stop and think about the pain we have suffered, whether through the loss of a loved one or any other traumatic event, these are all part of what forms us into the people we have become. So often we choose to hide our problems instead of embracing them to find the hidden treasures that are often overlooked.

Immediately after the birth of my second child, I was diagnosed with severe post-partum depression. My troubled marriage that was filled with chaos was coming to an end. The situations that led me to the place of complete hopelessness were overwhelming at best. As part of my recovery, I began to write down my thoughts and feelings about each event that took place. What began as an struggle to sort through the pain, evolved into a full visual expression of raw emotion and the spiritual journey that accompanied my experiences. Although not your average scrapbooking theme, it is one that played a vital role for me in finding peace and healing.

Piecing it all together with photographs, carefully selected scrapbook paper and just the right stamping and embellishments gave each painful recollection a sense of validation. It was like placing a mirror up to my wounded heart and saying, ‘Yes, that is what I felt. Right or wrong, good or bad. These emotions are mine.’ To be able to openly express myself this way and to have a visual reminder has made it easier to let go of the pain, forgive and move toward healing.

My scrapbook album, titled ‘A Journey Through Life’s Challenges’ does not sit on my coffee table out on display. Instead, it sits on the desk in my office, waiting for times, sometimes through tears, when I need a reminder of where I’ve been to truly be grateful for where I am today.

As scrapbooking has taken the world by storm, more people are turning to the computer to create beautiful pages that mimic current paper scrapbook techniques and trends. To venture into the world of electronic scrapbooking, you don’t need to be a professional graphic artist. You simply need a computer, digital scrapbook software, and a digital scrapbook kit or two to get you started. Once you discover what you can do with a computer, the possibilities for displaying your precious memories will be endless.

Scrapping a digital album will save you tons of space that is normally needed to keep paper crafting stored and organized. Everything is located in on place - on your computer. There is no need for paper racks, tool boxes or cropper cases. However, organization is still essential and can be easily achieved with a well-planned directory system. Otherwise, it can be easy to loose track of your computer scrapbook embellishments and forget what you already have. Clean-up is a snap with electronic scrapbooking. You won’t need to pick up paper scraps, or put away crafting tools. If you are interrupted in the middle of designing your computer scrapbook page layout, simply saving it is all you need to do without worry about keeping your layout in tact before you can finish it.

Whether you are new to making scrapbooks or are searching for new and creative ways to design them, electronic scrapbooking is an exciting alternative to paper crafting. But beware. It is just as addicting as its counterpart and equally rewarding. So have just as much fun preserving your memories as you do making them.

Anyone who travels, works, lives, or breathes, has a story. Some story.

“We walked down the mountain but when we had almost reached the bottom it was dusk and we got lost among the big rocks … we wound up walking for hours along a narrow ledge in the dark, with a precipice to our right and trees all around … we could see the village to our right but then the electricity went out and all the lights of the village went dark … “

“We built our website in 1999, then realized it was the wrong niche so we dropped it to follow other endeavors. Three years later we found out the website had climbed to the top without our realizing it and we were suddenly making …”

“When we were 7 years old we lived in Ireland. We used to hitchhike around the country and sleep in abandoned castles … me and a group of kids … I can’t remember if we were supposed to be in school”

“When I first saw my wife she was in an office, she walked in and out quickly and gave me a passing glance. Five years later I met her again but this time it was in a bus …”

“My mother home-schooled me for a year when I was 9. I spent most of my school time walking around the beaches and getting lost amongst the tall reeds, attending theatre classes, and making artwork out of shells. When I returned to public school the following year, I was ahead of everyone in my class and eventually I had to be advanced a year in school …”

“My first job was for a newspaper. I wrote about the latest weddings and engagements. We always had to write about the theme of the party and what colors would be used. One day I accidentally reported on the wrong color and the newspaper got a phone call from the bride …”

“I wanted to be the first to … “

“I always dreamed that one day I would ….”

“We picnicked under the same birch tree every spring time until …”

“I saved up for three years before I bought my first ….”

Everybody has a story. We like to tell each other our stories sometimes. In long car-rides, at dinner parties, while waiting for the bus …

What’s your story.

At Your Poems Your Stories we are always interested in publishing your story. We like to hear what you have to say – about anything.

by Anna Williams

Free Poems
Poems Poets and Poetry

I am so happy that I now have free online photo storage. Now that I have all my older prints online, I can create new prints of my old photos. It is so much fun sending a print of a picture that was taken 30 years ago to my sister in Wisconsin. She called me and said she could not figure out who was in the picture at first! We had a lot of laughs since then thanks partly to free online photo storage. We are always talking about all the good times we had as kids growing up near the Wisconsin Dells. Now that I live in Arizona, the weather is nicer, but I sure miss the old times. But I don’t miss the snow, so it is sort of an even trade!

There is no doubt about it. Paper crafts are a very popular hobby at the moment. Scrapbooking is a really good way to showcase pictures and chronicle family history. Other paper crafts include creating greeting cards.

When you start out at paper crafts, it is easy to spend a great deal of money! It is best to go easy early one until you decide what particular paper craft items you are most likely to use. For instance, you might discover you love working with stickers in scrapbooks, but infrequently use rubber stamps. If this is the case, it would make sense to spend more on stickers and less on rubber stamps for your paper crafts.

I am sure everyone has some of their photographs stored somewhere in a shoe box or laying around in a drawer. Scrapbooks are an ideal way to put the photos out where people can appreciate them.

You will require a loose leaf binder, some plastic page protectors, and a selection of colored cardstock to get you started. Many paper crafts experts will only buy archival quality products. It’s best to check as you buy. Most paper products, even the cheaper ones, are labeled “acid-free,” which indicates that they shouldn’t wash out or otherwise worsen if stored for a long time. Sunlight will bleach nearly anything, but your paper crafts should not be that much.

To begin a scrapbook there are several choices. You can select photos that are all associated with one milestone, for example a trip or a sports match. This variety of scrapbook will be short, but can be arranged around a theme. This is a good option if the photos are in some sort of order. If they are, then you may wish to pick 4 or5 photos around a particular theme, and change the theme for each page. You may want to include some 2 page spreads in the scrapbook.

Stick the photos to the cards with gluestick or double-sided tape squares. Then it’s time to garnish the sheet with paper shapes, stickers, or rubber stamped designs. And, you can use a colored gel pen to write dates, names and any other relevant remarks about the activities in the pictures.

Other items are readily available paper crafts stores. For example die cuts, which are pieces of paper pre-cut into shapes and objects. You can also purchase special scissors that cut paper with a creative edge. A pair of scissors known as “deckle” scissors is really useful for designing spectacular scrapbook pages, greeting cards, and other paper crafts. If you also have a pair of pinking shears that are too blunt to cut through fabric, you can use those for cutting out shapes and pictures.

Lots of paper crafts devotees start with scrapbooking, but then extend to making their own greeting cards. These items do not have to have an original verse on the inside. A simple ”Birthday Greetings”, Wishing You A Speedy Recovery, or even simply ”Best Wishes” is enough to light up anyone’s day, so don’t concern yourself about not being a good enough writer to make your own greeting cards.

Rubber stamps often make lovely greeting cards. You can even add tiny ribbons, beads and other materials to your hand made cards. A handmade card is very likely to delight anyone, whether they are interested in paper crafts or not.

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A wedding anniversary is¦Wedding anniversaries a special¦fantastic time for any couple¦husband and wife and there are many ways that this occasion¦event is celebrated. Every couple is different, some may consider this event a personal affair and do not wish to receive wedding anniversary gifts. Others will pull out all the stops¦big guns, have a huge party and expect you to take the time to find them
a suitable gift¦a unique gift.

Generally, if the anniversary is an early one the couple are more likely to have a quiet¦sombre affair and you will not be expected to search high and low for anniversary gifts. Sending a card is always a nice gesture but save them for later years where historically the day will be celebrated with family and friends.

If you have been invited to celebrate the special day and you are attending a 50th anniversary then you will need to consider suitable anniversary gifts. Think about whether you are going to go with tradition and find something ‘Golden’ such as a gold photo frame, gold rimmed glasses or even a piece of gold jewelry, or do you want something that is different and stands out?

You may even decide to make a speech at the gathering expressing your feelings for the couple, if you do decide to do this but find you are stuck for words why not enlist the help of and online poet or speech writer?. Standing up in front of a room full of friends and family and reading a speech or poem may seem daunting but you will be surrounded by loved ones who will be both moved and honored to hear your words.

If you are searching for these for your parents or siblings now is the time to really make the effort, especially if the anniversary is for a 25th, 30th or 50th. Reaching such a milestone really is an achievement and the couple should be made to feel very special.

Wedding anniversary gifts do not have to be materialistic or cost you a fortune, quite often the sentiment and effort far out weighs the cost. Spending time finding ones that are personal and unique will be regarded highly by anyone because the person you present it to will know you have spent a lot of time when choosing it.

If you are into scrapbooks, rubberstamping, or other types of papercrafting, you most likely have quite alot of one thing: paper. Since I have so much paper, I used to have a terrible time trying to organize it all. I used to just store it in a drawer and would have to hunt around through the stack whenever I was looking for paper. Eventually I started using a couple of far more efficient methods for storage that looks beautiful and lets me pick out the perfect paper in a matter of seconds. Allow me to share with you my experience.

Most of my paper comes in 12×12 blocks perfect for large style scrapbooks. I also have a fair bit of 8.5×11 paper that is your normal letter sized paper. The paper I buy for my scrapping tends to be the 12×12 and it does not fit properly into a standard file cabinet like my letter paper would. When I buy the paper, it’s usually in big paks, all shrink-wrapped up in a bundle. This saves alot of money and I get all sorts of wonderful paper from buying it this way. However, once the shrink-wrap is off, the paper is just loose and really requires a good storage solution.

Organize It!

The first thing I do when I unwrap my paper is organize it. The scrapbook paper tends to often only be imprinted on one side so I make sure all the paper is facing the same direction if it’s imprinted paper. Once I have it all going in the same direction I organize it by color. How many colors you use depends on how much paper you have. If you only have a few hundred sheets then maybe the 3 primary colors will be sufficient. If your like me though, go ahead and make piles for all the colors. I actually now have piles for combinations of colors, such as red/green, as well as a separate pile for straight red and a separate pile for straight green.

Store It!

Now let’s find a good method of storage. One great method is to use the large ziploc freezer bags. These bags are very large square baggies that can hold 12×12 paper. Make sure you get the heaviest ones you can and ones that have the little plastic zipper at the top of them. I once bought the non zipper kind of bags and they kept popping back open when I shuffled stuff around. I ended up just switching them out for the zipper ones.

Another great method for storing your paper is with the rubbermaid or clearview style plastic drawers. These translucent drawers are everywhere nowadays. They are affordable and they are often stackable. The drawers are actually available in 12×12 size and can fit large scrapbook paper perfectly. I have 3 sets of 3 drawers each that are stacked up beside my crafting station. That gives me 9 different drawers full of different colored paper that I can sort through very easily.

I hope these ideas have inspired you to organize your own collection of paper. Take the time and plan on spending a few hours going through all your paper, facing it the right direction, and organizing it into color coordinated piles. After you are done you will take pride in a job well done and you will thank yourself time and time again every time you reach for a piece of paper.

As the Holiday season approaches more and more people are looking for unique and personalized Christmas gifts to give to loved ones and friends. It is always a challenge to find a Christmas gift that will be a lasting treasure and legacy for future generations.

A vintage Christmas scrapbook is an idea for a unique Christmas gift that can easily be created by digital scrapbooking. You could quite quickly and easily create a vintage Christmas scrapbook filled with memories of previous special holiday times to give as a Christmas gift. For example, you could use photos of previous years of Christmas family get togethers and capture these memories in a special scrapbook. This special gift could become a family heirloom, that will be treasured by future generations.

First of all collect all the photographs you would like to use and place them in folder on your desktop. This makes it easier to access them. You can take older hardcopy photographs and scan them into your computer. Look for photos that show your beautifully decorated home, family members dressed in their Christmas best, sitting down for that wonderful dinner, or that capture the joy, surprise and happiness that Christmas brings. It will be a great to create memories of your family life to see how the children have grown and changed over the years, as well as to remember those family members who are sadly no longer with you.

You will need a photo editing program to create your digital scrapbook. If you don’t have one, you can purchase software programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Digital Image Pro. However if you have not tried digital scrapbooking before you might want to choose to download a free program from the internet such as Scrapbook Max or Scrapbook Flair

The next thing is to go onto the internet to find a Vintage Christmas digital scrapbook theme that you like. Ready made Vintage themes are very inexpensive and you can use them over and over again, and change them to make them unique very easily.

Once you have selected and downloaded your vintage Christmas scrapbook theme, you can start to create your pages.
Photographs can easily be placed into the layout, cropped or re-sized by the click of your mouse. Usually this can be done by dragging and dropping the images into the page.The vintage pages are usually soft and elegantly designed and perfectly coordinated to look beautiful with formal pictures. You can even change the colours of the scrapbook layout very easily.If you want to be able to change the photograph colour to a sepia, to add to the vintage look you can easily find a online tutorial that tells you how to do that.

Most Christmas digital scrapbooking kits come complete with journal pages to record your holidays. Choose a layout that has 8 x 8″ page size.This will make printing convenient and affordable. Just add your photos and your Christmas story Print your pages on your color printer or send them to your local office supply for printing. By using different photograhs for each gift you can create a unique personalized gift for each person
The great part is that you can have multiples made and keep one for yourself.

To perfect the gift find a classic album cover and wrap with a velvet ribbon.

You can make a unique and memorable gifts this holiday quite simply by digital scrapbooking. With digital scrapbooking ,you can make Christmas cards, tags and
Christmas themed pages and display photographs and journal for those
special people in your life. This article will outline the basic steps for you

Digital scrapbooking is done on the computer. To do digital scrapbooking you do need to have a software program that will help you create your creative digital masterpieces. You can purchase software programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Digital Image Pro. However if you have not tried digital scrapbooking before you might want to choose to download a free photo editing program from the internet such as Scrapbook Max 

The first thing to do is to select your photos that you want to display. You can use a photo taken with your digital camera or you can scan pictures to get them onto your computer. 

Your photos will determine the color scheme of your Christmas layout
Next, you create a new image from a blank canvas in your software program. Decide the size of page that you want to use. This might be a 12″ by 12″ or 8.5 by 11″. Many layouts are now 8 X 8″. 

When you have decided the size of your canvas and photo you want to use, the next step is to select your Christmas background. To choose a background you have many possibilities. You can download images from the Internet. On the Internet you will find many different holiday designs that are free or you can purchase them. You can find a selection of designs that are already
coordinated for you.Then all you you really need to do is to personalize the design with your photos. 

The next stage is to add the text and embellishments. Digital scrapbooking software has many ready made texts and embellishments to choose from. You can put these important touches onto the page very easily. Then add some finishing touches. Features that you might want to experiment with are drop shadows, embossing effects, brushes, textures and many others. Using these features helps your page to look very attractive and highlights whatever you want to be the focus of your page.

Once you are happy with the result, it is easy to change the photos and text to make gifts for others also.

A Christmas digital scrapbooking kit is a quick and easy solution for a personalized gift this year. Digital scrapbooking keeps memories alive for a lifetime. Special gifts can be made cheaply and easily with a few clicks of your mouse button

Digital scrapbooking holds a myriad of possibilities at the click of a mouse.

It is easy to create unique gifts that hold special memories using a digital
scrapbooking program on your computer. You can find free software programs
online.

The advantage to digital scrapbooking, as opposed to traditional scrapbooking
methods, is that you can ctreat multiple copies of photographs or embellishments
very quickly and easily. The time involved in creating a creative memorable display can be easily invested over and over again. Just copy your design and
personalize it for another person by changing the
photographs, the layout, colors, and embellishments without having to
start all over again.

To save even more time, download a pre-made Christmas
digital scrapbooking kit, and add your own photographs and text

Why not make your friends
and relatives a calendar full of memories that will last all
through the following year. Create a basic template and
photos of people and events that will remind them of happy times all year long.

For every month create a different theme or have photos of family members
spanning years gone by

A gift such as a calendar can easily be sent across the miles digitally and
save mailing costs. Alternatively you can send the digital files to a local
printer who produce them professionally and these can be mailed as holiday
gifts.

Did you share a special event or celebration this year? Why not create
through digital scrapbooking
a keepsake of that time. There are special kits that can be purchased online that can make this project very simple and yet looking very professional.

Start thinking of the many possible gifts that you could create for family
and friends through digital scrapbooking for this year. I’m sure you have been
wondering how you can use all those digital
photos that are stored on your hard drive. Start looking at them, enjoy the
memories and choose some special ones for your digital scrapbooking project.