A few months ago I acquired this scrapbook kit from the Provident Living Table. In our ward (congregation) when the women meet together for an activity, there is a Provident Living Table where people can bring things they don't want and other people can take them if they do want them. At an activity on blogging (which inspired me to act on the idea to start this blog), I saw the scrapbook kits on the Provident Living Table before the activity started. I didn't pick it up, telling myself that I didn't need it and that surely someone else would take it. After the activity as I talked with my mom and ate some refreshments, I noticed the kit was still there. I wanted it, and after an activity that inspired me to tap into my creativity, I picked it up and brought it home.
For the next couple months it sat in my crafts cabinet while I racked my brains for an idea of what to use it for. And then the perfect idea hit me—I would use it to make a scrapbook of my college years. Once I had the idea, I then began planning and searching for photos.
I began brainstorming what I wanted to include in the scrapbook. I wrote my ideas on the back of the album packaging (see picture). I mapped out where I had lived, where I had worked, and other important experiences. I quickly discovered that a lot had happened in my college years and that it would be difficult to condense it into sixteen pages. As I got a better idea of what I wanted to include, I began using the step-by-step guide to plan what I wanted to include on each of the pages.
As I planned, I started looking through old digital photos and created a file on the computer to copy photos I might possibly use. During this process, I ended up reorganizing my folders of pictures by year to make it easier to find pictures from my college years. After looking through my digital picture files, I realized and remembered that for my first few years of college I did not have a digital camera.
Then began the search for the photos from those first few years. I found a box of photos that I thought they would be in, but unfortunately they were not there. That box only contained pre-college photos. I knew the pictures existed and even remembered specific ones I wanted to use, but I didn't know where else to look. A couple weeks later my mom asked me if I'd found the pictures yet. I replied that I had not, and then instantly, a picture came into my mind of where they were located. I went and looked, and they were there! Gratitude, relief, and happiness filled my heart.
Having found the pictures, I eagerly looked through them. I found some I wanted to use but was discouraged to discover that some of the pictures I wanted I didn't have prints of. But, I did have the negatives. So, I narrowed down the digital pictures, put them on a jump drive, and and took it and the negatives to Walmart to see if they could reproduce them. They could print the digital pictures, but not the negatives. However, they suggested I try CVS across town, and at CVS they were able to print the photos from the negatives.
Once I had the photos printed, I did some more planning and also began scrapbooking. Some pages I knew for sure how I wanted them to work, so I did those pages. Other pages I had a harder time with. I had to narrow down the photos even more. I also had to decide what order I wanted the events presented. In the end I chose to alternate the spreads between places I lived and other experiences. I spent a lot of time deliberating. My husband laughed when he saw that the packaging claimed it only takes one hour start to finish. Perhaps if I had not spent time altering the design of the pages and not spent so much time deliberating over what to put on the page, I could have taken me only an hour.
It took me a few days to finish it once I had all the pieces. I made mistakes in the process, like cutting photos too short and writing captions wrong, but I worked around those. In the end, I have a scrapbook I will treasure. Doing this scrapbook brought back lots of good memories of good friends and experiences, as well as a few bad experiences. It only scratches the surface of my college career, but I hope someday when I have kids and I show it to them, it can prompt the telling of stories from my college days. Below are pictures of the scrapbook pages.
After I finished the scrapbook, I showed it to my family. In doing so, I discovered that my sister had sent the scrapbook kit with my mom to the Provident Living Table. The kit had been given to my sister as a present, but since she's not into scrapbooking like I am, she decided to pass it on in hopes that it might get picked up by someone who would use it. Well, it was and I am very glad she was willing to get rid of it and didn't decide to keep it just because it had been given to her as a gift. Sometimes the best thing to do with a gift is to pass it on to someone who will treasure it more.
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