Simple Page

As you know, I've been doing some work on our Road Trip album.  We take lots of pictures, I mean A LOT!  But having those moments captured allow us to remember the small details about our trips.  But sometimes, those pictures aren't the best quality or there are just so many of them that doing fancy pages for all the photos just isn't feasible.  These photos that we have on our drive from Frutillar to Valdivia aren't great - in fact, all of them were taken on the go and so the angles aren't perfect and some of them are a bit blurry.  But I still wanted to include them in our album, for the memories since that's what scrapbooking is for me.  I have this template from Cathy Zielske that worked perfectly for them.

The only thing I added was the dotted border around the pictures, also from Cathy Z.  The papers are freebies from Katie Pertiet, over at Designer Digitals community challenges.

I love doing more creative things with my photos as scrapbooking is my only creative outlet and I love the feeling I get from a cute page I've done.  However, I don't think that all pages need to be creative, in my sense of them.  Sometimes, just a focus on the photos with the story and none of the fluff is perfect.  My monthly collages are the perfect example of this.  I love doing them - we see our lives that month in pictures with some of the details recorded.  And even better is that they're fast to do.  So, that sense of accomplishment is wonderful.

I've come to realize that a mix of creative and simple is what I want for my scrapbooks.  I don't expect to love every page and that's fine.  If you're trying to keep up or make up some ground with your photos as well as using scrapbooking as your creative outlet, I don't know if it's possible to love every page.  I'm such a slow scrapbooker, especially with paper, that I'd be spending even more time than I do on each layout trying to get it so I love it.  As long as I don't hate it, it's good.  And my latest realization is that I can love those simple pages too, just as much as the ones where I add lots of embellies, borders and all the fun stuff.