Beautiful Stuff

Sequins, pressed flowers and some patterned papers. Just bought the sequins and love it because it's so shiny. Can't wait to do some pieces using them. As for the pressed flowers, I have only used them recently and I love it! Got a lot of those from old bunga telur that my mom kept. I'm making the best of the things that are already available instead of buying them.

I usually use wrapping papers as my patterned paper. So many varieties to choose from. So far, I have no problem with it. Here's a tip to buy/use the wrapping paper: buy the one that is not from shiny paper. I usually buy the papers from Hinode shop (the RM5 shop) because it goes for the price of RM 1 apiece. Other places sold them for RM 1.50 or higher.

Getting The Ideas

In my humble opinion, the best possible way to get ideas for a layout is to look at other people's layouts. You can surf the net or you can buy scrapbook magazines that are available on the newsstands. But I prefer surfing the net to get ideas because those magazines tend to be so pricey, especially because I am on a student loan and students loans are not supposed to be spent on things like that. ;D

The sites that I visited the most are scrapneeds.com.au, scrapbooks.com and scrapspot.com. There are many others, believe me, but these are the ones that I visits frequently.

Go through the gallery to view the layouts. There are countless beautiful layouts out there. What I usually did was look and if I see anything that I like, I try to do a sketch of the layout and try to incorporate that into my own layouts. Sometimes I worry about copying but as I work on my layouts, I didn't end up with the same kind of layout that I based my layout on because every person has their own style, so it's not always the same. So now I don't worry anymore. Plus, I think there's a term in scrapbooking called scraplift where you 'copied' from other people's layout. Correct me if I'm wrong!

The Start of An Obsession

I started to be so obsessed with scrapbooking when I stumbled upon this site: scrapneeds.com.au. It was totally random. I don't really know how I got there but it was a link from a totally random blog that I visited. I don't even know what made me so interested to check out the site but there I was, browsing through the galleries, looking at all these beautiful layouts and found myself thinking, "Hey, I want to do that too."

So I did. My first few attempts was far from decent, but it was okay. I'm still learning after all. Gradually, I improved and developed my own style. Now, I make cards and gifts for my family and friends instead of buying them. It feels great! I love what I am doing and I was like, "If only I can do this for a living."

This is how one of my first layout looked like:

Wanna know more about scrapbooking? Go here