Thursday, October 9, 2008

Scrapbooking Your Pregnancy

What a unique way to preserve the joyous event of being pregnant. Preserve these precious memories in the form of a scrapbook. You may decide to do an independent pregnancy album or combine this within your baby album.

Ideas that you may decide to include in your album:

- Journal your thoughts and emotions when trying to become pregnant.
- Journal your thoughts and emotions when you found out you were pregnant.
- Take a picture of your positive pregnancy test.
- Write down the names you debated on.
- Ultra sound pictures.
- Date you felt the first flutter or movement.
- Pregnancy symptoms.
- Food cravings.
- Dreams of baby.
- Take pictures of your profile each month and watch as your belly grows.
- Photos of nursery, under construction and completed are always fun.
- Baby showers.

Another thing you might consider doing is asking your health care provider if you can get a photo copy of your records to include in your album so you can see your weight gain and the baby’s heart rate.

Are you/ did you keep a journal during your pregnancy? Include these pages in your album to create a truly special memory keepsake.

Most importantly, there is no right or wrong way to go about doing this album. However you decide to create your pages is perfect. Have fun; this is your album, do it your way! Enjoy!

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Why Digital Scrapbook?

Digital Scrapbooking seems to be all the rage at the moment. And I have had to ask myself why? What is so special about scrapbooking digitally? I already have all my pictures, paper, stickers, pens, and whatnots ready to go. They just need to be assembled, completed. So here are some reasons why one might consider choosing to digital scrapbook over the more traditional format.

For starters there is no need to go out and buy all the different papers, pens, stickers and other embellishments for your album pages, they are already prepared for you on the computer.

There is no need to get your picture printed out to scrap them. Simply load the pictures from your camera’s memory card onto your computer. Now you have access to all your pictures via your computer. There is no longer the fear of loosing a photo in a pile because they are all right there on your PC. Just make sure you organize your pictures on your computer or you could loose them there too.

Many digital scrapbooking programs have cropping tools, photo enlargers, photo enhancers, red eye reduction tools etc. You can do all the work to your photo without the mess of scrap photo pieces flying about. No mess to clean up. How awesome is that! And with the ability of enlarging a photo right through your digital scrapbooking program you no longer need to go to the photo centre but simply do it from the comfort of your own home.

Now some people may say they cannot afford to do digital scrapbooking because of the cost. Okay, true, the cost for a completed book can run you around $45 and up. But consider this. If you were to keep a running tab on how much you spend per album on all the different papers, stickers and other embellishments not forgetting the cost of the album and pages you might find that digital scrapbooking could be dare I say cheaper in price? But not quality I can assure you. And you don’t have the worry of left over stickers etc. when you are done.

Ultimately it is personal preference and choice. I have tried digital scrapbooking and found I love it! I will, however, continue to scrapbook the “traditional” way. I personally find I like the creative freedom in whichever format I choose to work in. Whatever method you choose, remember, do what makes you happy, do it your way!