Remembering good times

I have mixed feelings about scrapbooking - detest that "business" of putting together pages of emotional self indulgence, recording a picture-perfect image of the world and buying into an industry where it's ok to copy, to lift and to follow every step of someone else's creativity. And yet, I enjoy looking in scrapbooking shops for the very details I love to include in some of the things I make, enjoy the inspiration of some of the "mistress scrappers" like Ali Edwards and sometimes, I even make "memory books" myself.

I've found that, after a very special event, a meeting of friends or family, one thing which is really appreciated is a collection of the photographs taken and a few memories recorded. I suppose these could simply be printed out and put into a small album, with labels of when and where taken and who's in the picture. But somehow that's all too straightforward and with my usual "why make it easy when with a bit of time and effort, you could make it a little more challenging" approach, I usually make little hand made books for the key people involved.

This year, rather than make concertina-style books from scratch myself as I've done in previous years, I decided to take an idea from the aforementioned Ms Edwards, and customise a ready-made 7gypsies mini tag book (Bought from the Craft Emporium whose extremely efficient service I highly recommend) and a few sheets of Basic Grey papers (in the "Fruitcake" series) I've done six of these small books, all ever-so-slightly different, and tailored to the person they were made for and am about to drop them into the post.

I've quite enjoyed putting them together and hope they'll hit the spot. From previous experience, I think they will do exactly that.