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The Scrapbooking Journey

Let's talk about me do we have tio let's talk about my story? Okay, why am I here instead of somebody else um let's get ready for some really terrifying photos that's me and my sisters took of nineteen ninety ish nineteen ninety two she's going to love me for that I didn't tell her I put it in there just to torture her so I was born to a crafty mama who should be watching right now I mom she always encouraged me to be crafty she's crafty herself she taught me how to say so she taught me how to crush a she taught me she always let us paint christmas ornaments when I was probably ten or eleven she let me paint my room and senseless I did it harold job and she never said anything she's pretty amazing and when I I was about nine years old she took me teo a sampling party and I don't know I still remember this but I d'oh um and it was this parties where they sold the rubber stance is called dots I think they sold the rubber stamps and it wasn't for scrap booking it was for like card making ...

and that kind of stuff but for me it was it turned into scrap booking so I started scrap looking at a really young age I started scrapping again nine I still have this crap let's um so I actually brought a script look let's talk about it. Speaking of this is my high school year scrapbook my ninth grade scrapbook and you can see how terrible it is. Yeah, yeah so I have scrapbooks like this that are go throughout my whole childhood and it's crazy it's horrible they're awful but they're perfect because there where I was and what I did and they tell my story and so it's always been really important for me to tell my story even when I was a kid and I was using pictures with other people took of me it was really important for me to get them in albums and I have little captions and just so that I think I inherently knew at that age that my story was important and eventually my kids story is important too so but I was born on the dreaded the cusp of the dreaded millennial generation and everybody hates the millennials I know but that's I was in the very beginning of the millennial generation which meant I always had a computer. My dad had a really old computer dos I think mac even and I remember playing pinball on it when I was a kid um and so I always had a computer growing up I even have my own computer once I hit nineteen years so I always knew how to use the computer um I made websites when I was young fourteen I made I tried to make a website for my dad's company and it was one of those really I don't know horrible programs where you have the scrolling text you remember those web sites where the text was scroll across the screen yeah those high tech so it was really awesome and then when I was sixteen I made the memorial pamphlet for my grandmother who died I made her you know we hang out at the funeral and microsoft publisher I think oh my gosh so I was always on the computer and then I eventually turned it into scrap booking on the computer even though it wasn't really scrapbooking at that point um when I was in high school my freshman year I two options I didn't get the elective that I wanted which I don't even know what it was at this point but my two options or photography or dance I don't know the intel but I'm not a dancer I have two left feet and no rhythm and I candidates like this so yeah we don't dance so photography it wass and I wasn't really interested in it for some reason I'm not quite sure why but I did it anyway and my dad bought me this really beautiful um canon rebel at the time it was a film camera and the moment that it was putting my hands it was over I adored photography I took pictures of everything it was my freshman year and that was my freshman scrapbook so you could see all the black and white stuff was stuff that I did in my photo class and I took pictures of people I didn't know and took pictures of the stairs and took pictures of my dog and they were terrible and I love them and it was so fun um my sophomore year in my high school we had to do community service we had one hundred, one hundred hours of community service although it felt like a hundred years that we had to do by the time we graduated and so they had these internship programs that you could dio and most people did internships at computer companies and that kind of stuff filing paperwork. But they had a photo studio internship the year that I was a sophomore and this changed my life because it was a man who he took photos but he also had photo shop and he made cd covers and he made booklets and things like that. And so instead of taking photos he had me making cd covers and I actually made a cd cover for him that was used and I get we get paid for it because I was an intern but I actually googled it and found it online and I can't believe that they used it was terrible but um that was my introduction to things on the computer and photo shop that was the first time he touched photo shop um at sixteen a mall opened in my hometown and they needed to stop the mall and so I started working at j c penney which I hate it it was awful I'm not cut out for retail not cut out for standing up all day it's just not me eso as soon as they had in ah an opening in the photo studio I transferred over there and I worked in photography my entire high school career other than that two months of jaycee penny I moved from j c penney portrait's to glamour shot it was amazing and then into the picture people and so I always was surrounded by photography I was always thinking about I was always the kid at school with the camera driving everyone crazy the kid in the middle of the dance making the flash go off and everyone screaming and groaning because it was so dark and on the flash goes off yeah, I was in knowing one but I have so many amazing memories captured because of this and so um junior year uh I joined the yearbook now this is it I joined the yearbook and I didn't get assigned teo the regular yearbook stuff I got assigned to these things called senior ads and you know what a senior at this okay they're in the back of the year book this is the first year I did them um and they are ads that parents can take out for their senior so it funds the yearbook because they they pay for it and it's basically there's little scrap booking horribly done in the back of the year but it's these these air what I started with and this was my introduction into digital scrapbooking though I didn't know it at the time I didn't use for the shop I used whatever in design was back then and um I sat for an entire year designing all of these photo collages in the back of the yearbook so it's pretty crazy it seems like everything in my life coalesced into digital scrapple caving before I even knew it before just scrap booking existed it's pretty crazy so my senior year I'd always been an honor student I took ap classes I took I got straight a's for the most part um hated pt but that was it uh my senior year I got a serious case of senioritis hi I was done I was I was I wanted out I was done with school I still passed I still got aids for the most part but I was done and I started rebelling and I got into five colleges umb full scholarship to a couple of them and I didn't go to any of them because I was done I was tired and I was rebellious and I was always a very headstrong kid but it really coalesced in my senior year and I was just out of there so I moved out two months after I turned eighteen and not my own apartment with my mom's help of course and there was this boy across the way and he was adorable and within two months were pregnant hello welcome really life and uh carson was born when I was nineteen years old and I I got pregnant when I just turned nineteen and he was born before I was done being nineteen and we were poor we were broke we were miserable and I got married he was born in may we were married back by october and right around the time I was getting married I found this book called a simple guy to digital scrapbooking it was the second edition by the now different simple scrapbooks and I was in love this was amazing. It was just like what I was doing a paper except I was terrible a paper and I was better at this although I was still pretty terrible but it was two thousand four and everybody was pretty terrible the products were terrible, the photo shop knowledge was terrible, everything was terrible and also I was broke super broke, we were barely making it so I couldn't afford to buy anything either and so and in two thousand four beginning of two thousand five I started making my own stuff I figure if I can scrap book I can make the product to I was deluding myself but supplies were still in my price range so I start with wow just these air my first layouts with my first visual kids because I got rid of the previews for my first initial kids ah long time ago they're depressing so I went back and I found layouts using them and you could see how depressing they are. I was awful I was awful at my job but um a lot of people were awful so I was awful in a group of really awful people and so I was actually pretty good for being awful and I mean a money I started selling um I, um I worked my way around the industry um and it wasn't enough we were still poor we were still struggling, but eventually in two thousand seven um I bounce, I bounced around I had the second baby joe sia and I joined the sweet shop and sweet shop is amazing. It had already been established with beautiful work and I started making real money like I went from maybe not surviving to hey, we could buy dinner so my little scrap booking business, as my family like to call it, um nobody thought it was viable nobody thought that I could ever do anything worthy in this business they supported me and they loved me, but they really were hoping I'd get a real job but I had two babies and I can't afford daycare to go get a real job and my husband did have a real job and so I stayed home with them and I struggled through trying to learn photo shop and in two thousand seven when I joined sweet shop, I really started making advances and getting better because when you're surrounded by people who are amazing, you want to strive to be amazing and I wanted to like I wanted to be worthy of being chosen to sell there, so I really dedicated my time tio really learning my craft so um a few years later and I think well around the same years, probably two thousand eight I went back to russell to get a degree and I didn't really want to go back to school. I did, but not because I thought that I needed the degree but because I had always told myself that I was the kind of person that got a degree and this is what my babies look like when I went back to school they were tiny this is actually on campus um I had a three year old and a one and a half year old and it was crazy and I could only go at night, and I started with one class and I knew that if I only did one class tonight, it would be at one class with the master, it would take forever, and I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in school, so over the next three years, I went to school at night and I worked on my business by day and it was rough. It was a lot of work and I didn't sleep a lot and I struggled with my kids and balancing everything, but it was worth it. And by the end of twenty ten, I finished with an a in an s, both in graphic design in graphic illustration. But if anything is I finished like this. I was nine and a million months pregnant with my third son. I looked like this. It was amazing birth control. I don't think anybody got pregnant that year because I was waddling around the campus and nobody wanted to be like me, so I finished at the end of twenty ten huge, but I was done, I got my degrees and I decided not to go in to get my bachelors, because in all honesty, I had learned way more in my business and by doing what I was doing than I ever cut in school, in fact. When I was done with my degree, the professor who was the head of the department offered me a job, he said. Once you're done popping that kid out that's huge, um and you want to come back if you ever want to teach, you have a job, so because I'm teaching a lot of his classes for him, I teach something in being the brat that I was like, you know, that there's a better way to do that so he's like, hey, come teach for me. So after I finished my degree, I had all this free time at night that I never had before, and I really kicked my business into high gear. I really wanted to start making this a real thing. I was making decent money, that sweet shot, but, um, my husband was trying to be a, uh, personal trainer at the time, and so he wasn't making a lot of money anymore, so I really we needed to kick it in and we needed to start making money. So I have fin in january twenty eleven and about many year that year, I really kicked it up a notch. Um, now I work with, um I got my first teaching dog job with lane ayman, who was here a creative life, um, and she's like do you want to teach and I said no I don't know how to teach I don't know like I know how to dio but to put that in the words and to teach other people how to do what it is I want to dio um no I don't want to do that but I did it anyway and I was so nervous it was a pre recorded one hour class on how to make a simple christmas card they're so easy so simple but her audiences paper scrap pickers so I was teaching to people who didn't no necessarily digital scrapbook so after that I was like, wow actually I kind of liked that let's let's do it again and I started working with her I have done a few of her events and in the middle of twenty thirteen tiffany tell men contacted me and asked me to teach for scrapping ears and that's a digital scrapbooking learning website which is kind of new in the industry you there wasn't a lot of learning websites for digital scrapbooking in that way and instead of teaching scrapbooking I taught design because that's what I'm good at so after that I hooked up with a lot of paper cos I'm working with costumer blew my mind's eye I have paper lines and michaels and I just got picked up by simple stories and I think if you go to the simple stories blogged today they have my snap sets that are debuting its t h ey so that was pretty good coincidence so my whole my whole adult life has been about scrapbooking always my whole my childhood was about scrapbooking too, but digital scrapbooking is my whole adult life nineteen years old I'm thirty now and I've been doing it forever it feels like everything has kind of coalesce into this crazy business that I adore and I adore gentle digital scrapbooking I adore it I tried to pay prescribe book and I'm not good at it s so visible it is so let's talk about my credentials why should you be listening to me? Yeah ok I have a funny fifty story but why should you be listening to me people saying you're way too hard on yourself the chairman was saying they actually really like your early stuff and you know that's what was that's what I think they're talking about my earlier I think you know that's what was available that was the programs that you can yes, you did a really great job of them they're actually really liking them that's funny I am I'm incredibly hard on myself, but who is it? So I've been digital scrapbooking and designing for ten years I cannot believe that I'm saying that I cannot believe it's been ten years but it has it's crazy um I've spent the last seven years designing for one of the top sites in the industry sweet shop designs um I adore it there they're my favorite people on the planet. I obviously haven't a and graphic illustration and graphic design and I'm a designer for various paper scrap booking companies. We've talked about that and now I can add experienced teacher and tutorial writer for digital scrapbooking you my I have tutorials on my blog's my block that has been pin thousands and thousands and thousands of times quite a few of them I've been pinned by big names so that's very exciting for me the first time I saw that I pinned by ali edwards I almost died on this is us now this is we just had our pictures taken by sarah cornish was my forehands and that puts us to where we are now and why I'm here. Um so before we start, uh, we were going through a lot of information and don't try to digest it all at once don't sit here and be like, overwhelmed because there's so much information and you just you can't even fathom how you're gonna remember all of it don't worry about it incorporate one tip into each new layout so if you seriously love the warping shot of technique that work on that and once you master that then incorporate any tip on a new layout and practice, practice, practice, practice. You know we're going to get anywhere in western practice all the time, and I know that most of us, it'll scrap pickers, air obsessive, and we practice and we scrapbook every day for the most part, so I shouldn't be too hard. Beauty of digital scrapbooking, isn't it. You can practice with the old glue and everything what you committed, you were committed. Yeah, you're not committed. If you don't like the layout when you're done with it, he didn't toss it and start over. If you don't like the background paper, never nothing's good down so you can change it in the end, anything you want to dio that's the beauty.