In the beginning….

I thought I would share a little perspective on my scrapbooking “career”..

I do not generally consider myself a creative person.  I have friends that are amazingly creative and I envy them sometimes but I definitely don’t put myself in that category.

When my kids were young my friends and I wanted to go out but we were not sure what to do for a night on the town.  I am not a drinker, not into clubbing, not a huge fan of movies and had not gone out consistently since the kids were born.  We also had a little motherly guilt about leaving our kids to do something for us.  Also anyone that knows me knows that I am “thrifty” so hiring a babysitter at $10 and hour seemed crazy!

One evening I decided to host a Creative Memories party.  My friends and I realized that we could get together at night and do something fun while accomplishing something amazing for our families.  It sounded like a win/win!!

The group became one of my kid’s fondest memories and some of my best times with friends.  Initially we thought we would leave the kids with husbands and get together at someone’s house without the kids but that didn’t work very well and before long we were meeting together on Friday nights with the kids.  The kids would run wild upstairs or out in the backyard and we would scrapbook and share stories, laugh and share struggles and “solutions”.  Sometimes we would stay up until 2am and the kids would either fall asleep or stay up and play.  It didn’t matter that my 8 year old was up at 2am running wild because it was just once a month and it was special time.  My kids loved it, I loved it and the whole family enjoyed the finished product.  My kids still asked to get together for “scrapbooking night” even into their teens.

So..  Back to perspective..

I was the person in our group that was on a scrapbooking mission.  Because I am a planner/organizer by nature I was all about getting projects done quickly and keeping my project organized.  I came up with a project and would create a picture plan, print the pictures and slap it in a book.  I would get 40 pages done in an evening.  They weren’t pretty but that wasn’t the point to me.  They were done!  There were other ladies there that were afraid to put the pictures on a page because it may not be perfect and ladies that spent an evening on two or three pages and they were beautiful.  Everyone has a different perspective.

Here is a picture of one of my early scrapbook pages.