Scrapbooking on a Bright White Background

Hello everyone!

It's been awhile. It's the end of the semester, a drop-dead-exhaustion kind of week. The end is in sight, but I've got to put my glasses on to see it. Okay not really, but you get the idea. I have managed to squeeze in a little bit of scrapbooking time here and there. I've been really inspired by the new Paper Lovers Studio blog lately. They've got some awesome challenges and freebies are always nice.

I've decided that for the time being, while I try and rediscover what I liked about scrapbooking and why I want to continue doing it, I'm going to make white my signature background color. It keeps things minimal, focuses on the photos and the journaling. I'm a big fan of white in scrapbooking these days. It's so clean and focused. So here are the layouts I've been doing.

This one was for the Paper Lover's "tough supply" challenge. I love transparencies but I find them so hard to use. When I made this layout, I discovered how easy it is to attach a full page transparency to a background using washi tape! If you look closely on the edges of the page, I used washi tape to adhere my transparency sheet.

2. I love how this layout turned out. It's exactly what I've been feeling in my minimalist-scrapbooker vibe. It's clean and calming, rather than overwhelming and stressful. The beach photo evokes calming, cool colors so I tried to mimic that in my page design.

3. Scrapbooking Jamaica! Even though Jamaica was my least favorite stop on the cruise the boyfriend and I took last year, I still wanted to scrapbook a few of the nicer photos. My journaling talks about how colorful everything was, even though Ochos Rios itself was disappointing and not very clean. 

I'm happy to be getting back into scrapbooking. I think it's the crafting I'll stick to for awhile. It's very personal and I don't feel tied down to any tedious projects. 

Reentering the scrapbooking world

I've been doing a lot of blog reading this week and I discovered I'm not alone out there in thinking scrapbooking has just gone crazy. It's become something it was never supposed to be. But still, I want to scrapbook because telling a story is beautiful. So that's what I will do with my supplies. Here's my first layout, my first jump back into scrapbooking. This is inspired by the sketch challenge at Paper Lovers Studio, an awesome new scrapbooking challenge blog.

I'm really into mint, peach, and salmon, so I tried to incorporate those colors in my layout. Since my scrapbooking is about storytelling, I've decided to share some stories here as well. My boyfriend and I went to Flamingo Gardens in Davie, FL, over spring break. It's this crazy botanical garden gone wild, mixed with swamp, mixed with animal sanctuary. In addition, it's got this island vibe (which really just means everything smells moist and on one is in a hurry to do anything!) that seems to say its glory days are long gone. Anyway, it was a fun, if not quirky place to visit.

I would say my venture back into papercrafting has gotten off to a good start. Any tips to take photos of scrapbook layouts with getting a glare on the photos?