For those of us living in the real world

Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing this hobby right – I have trouble shopping for stash, I am always running out of photos and I find it really, really hard to create layouts with only one photo. Yet almost all of the layouts featured on the big magazines have one photo – one huge photo and tons of text.

I know there isn’t a “wrong” way to scrapbook (unless you stick your photos on upside down or back to front, ha ha!) but I sometimes wish I could change my style. Other times I am glad I have a style and that I am comfortable with it because it makes creating pages so much easier... but then again, I don’t think I would ever get published in a magazine. Or win a competition. Or be somebody’s scrapping hero.

I do occasionally create one-photo layouts but it is usually because I happen to have a photo larger than 6x4 that I can use (I scrap 12x12 mainly so using a 6x4 photo on it’s own just doesn’t always work) and it is a special one. For me, my scrapbooks are about remembering a special moment or time and find that one photo just doesn’t do it justice so I generally use 3 or so for a single page layout. I don’t think my layouts look that bad either but of course they are never as good as the stuff in magazines.

Recently I received an email with a photo attachment that had two versions of the same photo: one was the original, un-touched photo of a girl in a bikini and the other was the airbrushed version that was used in the magazine. This of course made me feel so much better as it proves that it is simply impossible to look like the girls in magazines. Of course I knew that already, but somehow seeing the two images together made it all come home quite vividly.

I wonder if that can somehow translate to the scrapping magazine world – I will never be able to create a layout as beautiful as the ones in magazines. Not because of extensive airbrushing of the bumpy bits (but I guess that could happen) but because I suspect a lot of those layouts are specifically created for the magazine, with photos taken by professionals and embellished by scrappers that do not have to stick to a budget. So they can take one enormous, beautiful photo and spend £50 on one page – how is that realistic?

I shall continue plodding on with my pages, sticking as many photos as I can, journaling in my own handwriting (messy as that is), keeping to a reasonable budget and even creating embellishments to save some cash – but all the time happy in the knowledge that although the magazines may not be interested, I hope that my family will be and they become cherished keepsakes that I have created with lots of love!

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