A pretty big milestone

Thanks to okanogangirl's Layout Lottery challenge over at Club CK, I started keeping track of my layouts since January 1st.  And I am now at 200 layouts done for the year.  That is mind-boggling because I am a slow, slow scrapper.  Over the past year, since I joined two different scrapbooking message boards, my productivity has gone up dramatically.  I find I'm so inspired by my fellow scrapbookers and by the challenges that are given to the members on both forums.  For me, challenges are great motivators and make me excited to do different or new things on my layouts.  Challenges can get overwhelming if you try to do them all but if you just choose a few, I find them completely inspiring.

I think, though, the biggest reason for my increased productivity is that I've started digital scrapbooking.  I love paper scrapping but I'm very slow with it.  With digi, I have access to my pictures, the supplies I want and can work on anything I want at the drop of a hat.  I don't have to plan ahead with digi like I do with paper.  In the last few months, I've found a great balance between digi and paper.  If I'm finding that I'm not inspired with my paper layouts, I can switch it up and do some digi layouts and vice versa.  I feel like there's always something fresh so I'm never bogged down.

In discovering Cathy Zielske's monthly templates, I've found a way to keep up with our family happenings.  It's so easy to clip my photos to the clipping masks in her templates, write up what has happened that month and voilà, we have our family activities recorded.  They aren't the most creative but I finally have a sense of keeping up to date.  I plan on using them every month from now on.  That way, we won't forget those things we've done.  And I can still scrap the individual activities on fun, creative pages later but the details won't be forgotten.  I love these templates and am so happy I'm using them.

I have to say that I am very proud of the fact that in less than 5 months, I have created 200 scrapbook pages.  It'll be very interesting to see how many I'll have done at the end of the year.