30 days of 29, day 18: Scrapbooking

For some inexplicable reason, I have an irrational fear of scrap booking. For years I have sneered at it as a pseudo-craft where millions of (mainly) women pressure each other into spending ridiculous amounts of money on paper and machines that can cut said paper into adorable shapes, all so they can paste it all together and make something that looks exactly like an example in a book. "Scrapbooking", I would say, "clearly demands little thought, a lot of money and zero creativity, so where is the fun in that?"

Seriously, what was the deal with all of the zombie scrap booking herds?

Enter my own adorable offspring, whose cuteness leaps off the charts into uncharted territory with ever-increasing intensity. Clearly a mere photo album wasn't going to do the job of documenting The Life and Times of Espen. Clearly a click-and-drag photo book couldn't show the depth and breadth of my devotion to the little Master.

Clearly a scrap book was called for.

As it happens, my mother-in-law is a Scrapbooking Goddess. I'm pretty sure poofy-haired women with excessive paper supplies come from far and wide to kneel down at her feet, she is that good. In fact, for Christmas she made wedding scrapbooks for all of her married children, and I, the Despiser of all Things Scrapbooky, loved it so much that I left it on our coffee table for a good five months. And then I only reluctantly put it away once I realized everyone we knew had already seen it.

Therefore, when we spent the weekend with Nick's parents, she condescended from her crafty throne to instruct me in the ways of the Scrapbook.

It was scary. It was overwhelming. I felt totally inadequate in the face of that much paper. But it was also somehow... fun? I liked putting the composition and colours together, as well as looking for ways to keep the page balanced and not too over crowded. But I also really lacked in thinking up "scrapbooky" designs and solutions, because it just wouldn't occur to me stick a random bit of paper somewhere on the page. But somehow it all works and looks good.

Pictured are the unfinished fruits of my labours. I still need to print and crop a photo to stick on the light coloured part, and I need to make a facing page to go with it, but it gives you an idea of what I was able to do in an hour or so.

Now I just have about, oh, 30 more pages to do, and Espen's scrapbook will be complete. I think outsourcing a scrapbook might be wrong, yes?