I recently came across this scrapbooking site about ‘Documenting A Week In Your Life‘.

It struck a chord with me as I realised that’s what I’ve been doing recently! I take lots of photos of Darius everyday and then ‘document’ it the following week in the blog as a ‘Tot School’ post update. The difference is that I’m not documenting per day but one entire week summarised.

The beautiful pages created by others gave me so much inspirations. If I could document this part of Darius life and keep it in an album, I’m sure it will be wonderful memories to cherish later on. Webpages doesn’t keep forever.

So I took out my traditional scrapbooking supplies which had been lying in their little corner sadly for more than a year. I bought it from Plaza Singapura, a very nice scrapbooking store called Made With Love. Some small brads, studs and stickers are bought elsewhere, such as Spotlight. Their new arrivals at their blog lit up my eyes cos the stuff they have are all so pretty.

I got into the notion of scrapbooking for Darius while I was pregnant but eventually did not manage to find time to do it at all. Digital scrapbooking was also a more attractive idea since I’m used to the photoshop programme and there are plenty of free supplies on the net. Traditional supplies can be quite expensive since special acid & lignin-free paper, special glue, special acid & lignin-free extras need to be used in order to preserve it forever. But still I didn’t do anything serious digitally too.

The problem was printing. I need to accumulate enough pages to form a book to print at a professional printer and their services might not be cheap.

So finally due to the above motivational post, I started my first steps in creating hybrid scrapbook pages by hand(I printed some titles). It was really fun doing the actual printing, cutting, pasting of the photos and papers. I want to use up my limited supplies on hand so I just had to make do with them to try to create something.

Compared to the usual scrapbooking pages where only one or two photos are used, I grouped my pages into indoor, outdoor and favourite photos of the week pages. And I printed most of them in the same size (height at 700pixels for landscape) with some special photos slightly bigger to create contrast. I also printed out some journaling which I wrote on the blog to explain the pictures in orange boxes but the font turned out too small. I think fonts need to be at least 12pts to look good.

Printing the photos on Canon Paper Plus Glossy II. Getting as many of them into the sheet of paper as possible so as not to waste.

The end result to me is just not too bad. But I don’t like some aspects of them too. I don’t have the skills to adorn the paper with a lot of stuff or embellishments yet so they are very basic. Printing the text also does not look as good as pasting stickers or stamping (dun have the materials).

That’s the beauty of traditional scrapbooking. You can’t click on the button ‘undo’ or ‘delete’. I’m sure I’ll get better when I do it more.

A little messy but no choice as they are all taken at different times for different purpose. Tried my best to group similar ones together though.

I like this page the most as all the photos have a uniform look so it looked neat and was simple to create

The printed date didn't turn out nice enough once I pasted but couldn't undo. Included a section on Special moments of the week,besides the Favourite Pic of the week

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