My first experience with scrapbooking is thanks to a Groupon's coupon. I have seen it before, and passed some stores that were selling scrapbooking supplies beforehand, but my thought was more like that it was a glorified cut and paste, and why should I spent so much money on it?
Then I got a coupon for a cheap scrapbooking lesson. One finished page with 3 or 4 pictures, and I can keep the leftover supplies seems like a good deal.
I fell in love.
At first, considering the prices of the tools, I intended to make it very, very simple: cut and paste. I can buy one patterned paper for the background, cut another paper with cute pictures for decoration, and put the photos on a stock papers for frames.
One of the paper that's very nice for decoration
Then I got kind of bored. It's nice, but it's way too simple, and I want more. Luckily for me, I found some stores with quite nice sale =)
Now, I can of course, substitute my materials with their cheaper counterparts. I mean, paper is cheap, right? The problem came with the lignin and acid free thing. If you are familiar with paper scrapbooking, all the things for scrapbooking - papers, glue, sticker, etc - came with that writings. Over time, lignin and acid will make the paper etc, including your picture, became brownish. And this kind of defeating the purpose of scrapbooking: preserving your memories.
For tools, I tried to replace them. For example, if an embossing device is sold in daiso - plastic, not as good as those that purposely for scrapbooking, but still can be used - I bought them rather than the one in scrapbooking supplies store. But for materials, so far I can't find any cheaper alternative that's still acid and lignin free.
So yes, sale is a blessing.
It's more interesting when you can add pattern to the paper yourself by using ink or glitter and template or layout or stamp. Depending on how much you prepared to sacrifice for this hobby, you can also get a puncher for the paper edge, paper corner, an embossing machine, etc. Me, I am doing it as thrifty as possible....meaning I am hunting down this sale, and valiantly told myself that no, I don't need an embossing machine, ever.
My glitters, procured in a very huge sale. I love them
This one is a stitch piercer. Not as easy as it sounded, but made for very nice decorations =)
Some cute hanging brads that I bought online. Imagine them hanging on top of the photos =)
Cute quicklet eyelets from the same store. Can you tell that I love teddy bears?
When I touched the pattern, I got velvety texture
But then, I stumbled upon digital scrapbooking and fell in love all over again.
Digital scrapbooking is way cheaper than paper scrapbooking because I can re-use the elements over and over. But I also found out that this is not including the software, so if you already have a Photoshop or something like that, it's okay. But if you are not, well, digital is way, way more expensive I guess.
Also, if you want to make a good one, you will became a very best friend with this Photoshop (or something like that) program..I am not a stranger to Photoshop, but neither am I an expert on it. Lucky me, I got a few good friends who are really good at Photoshop, which means free, one on one tutorial..lol.
So far, one of the thing I love the most of digital scrapbooking is its ability to modify the picture itself. Granted, I can achieve the same result if I manipulated the picture first before printing it, but somehow I feel like I love to just save my result and use it.
The other thing is masking. with paper scrapbooking, I can framed the picture and I can cut the picture, but I can't made it blend into the background.
Also, with digital scrapbooking, error is okay, I can re-do it. With the paper one, if I had glued it, then that's it.
I noticed, that I can categorize digital scrapbooking kits' designers as two groups.
One is those that tried to imitate paper scrapbooking. This group, they made paper and decoration that we can 'cut' from the 'paper', brads, buttons, and ribbons. They also made glitter style, edger which is the way to imitate edge puncher, stamps, or paper template to imitate embossing.
The other group, They still have stamps and glitters, but not so much trying to emulate paper scrapbooking. I can further divide this group into two.
Half of them relied heavily on picture. So, they took pictures of real world things, extracted them, and polished them for the embellishments. You can, of course, cut and paste a picture of flower in your paper scrapbooking, but it won't looks at realistic as in digital, maybe because cleaning picture up in Photoshop is easier than using scissor...Besides, usually when you do it in paper scrapbooking, you will use a ribbon or paper flowers instead of cutting a picture of real flower.
The other half relied on drawing. They used tablets for drawings or scanning their drawings and made the pictures into embellishments.
Of course, there are some that's into mix media... and it doesn't mean that the two big groups are mutually exclusive either. It just the things that came to my mind when I saw the kits.
And talk about digital's advantage, there's another one that I don't like to admit, simply because it's not something that I like. Digital has a quickpage, where all you need to do is inserting your picture into the empty space of the layout and voila, it's finished. I think you can probably get the paper equivalent of this in a photographer' shop, but I never saw it in stores that are selling paper scrapbooking supplies.
Personally thought, I don't like them. After all, half the fun of scrapbooking is on the making. The other half of course, on displaying =p
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