Currently Making

In other home-body news, I have about 1/3 of my WWII Memorial Day scrapbook pages put together. Only one year after the fact.... Anyhow, I found a great deal on big (28 x 30) paper at Texas Art, I finally finished writing up all my notes, and now I'm actually gluing things down. So far I think it looks pretty good.

This was my first experiment with creating "digital pages" and while I'll admit that I really enjoyed the process of creating the pages online (FotoFusion is lots of fun, despite a weird GUI), it's a major hassle and expense to get from there to a physical product. And of course you want a real book, or at least I do. Half the fun is making the book. I like books, and so does the MO. Heaven knows you can tell that the instant you step into our house. We have tons of books.... And making books is just, well, it's like suddenly finding yourself in the principal's office but for some reason the grownups don't realize you're not supposed to be there. It's like getting away with something.

So, yeah, I want a physical book. In this particular case, I made my online layouts 12 x 12, since that's a "standard scrapbook size" and heavens-to-betsy, we wouldn't wanna be non-standard, now would we? So that's great, and they look terrific on my monitor, but did you ever try to find somewhere to print an image that big? Open your wallet, my friend. I got lucky, in that this whole techno-junkie thing is in the blood, and my dad had a yen for a large-format ink-jet printer, so my mom & dad printed my pages for me as a Christmas present. (This plan pretty much limits me to one scrapbook per year, you understand....)

Being me, I am not satisfied with just slipping these printouts into sheet protectors in a binder. There's still that whole BOOK thing to contend with. So I needed even bigger paper to mount the 12 x 12 pages on, and ideally this big paper would be twice as wide in case I want to stitch the binding, thus the wait for the sale at Texas Art.... And I've decided on a boring old post binding after all, but that's okay, it's still fun to play with the big sheets of paper. I have nine folios, thus thirty-six pages. Subtract front and back for the flyleaf and that leaves thirty-four. Twenty-four pages of pictures, ten pages of text. I've physically completed twelve of those pages so far, but they're all laid out. Haven't a clue what the cover is going to look like as yet....

I guess it wouldn't be nearly as much fun if you could just click the "make it a book" button, after all. I really do like the trimming and planning and gluing as much as taking the pictures in the first place :-)