My Theme Album

Well there's a first time for everything I suppose, but today I've been blogged twice!! Wow!

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August Theme Album Challenge

Wednesday August 06th 2008, 10:41 pm
Filed under: Theme Album, maggie

by Karen Maggie

I have a confession to make to all Theme Album Participants:  I’ve personally really struggled with my Theme Album pages.  My main problems are two-fold:

• My birthday photos are not good quality.  Since I’m doing a Birthday album, the photos span a time period of a dozen years.  Bad photography skills + bad camera = bad photos!  I had no knowledge of composition, many of the photos are blurry, and the colors in the photos are too random and hard to work with.   
• Multi-photo layouts and ‘event’ scrapping are difficult for me.  I find it much easier to create an attractive layout with just one photo.  With my theme album, I feel a strong obligation to use lots of photos to cover the whole story, even though the photos may not work together visually.  So I find myself trying to strike a balance between creating beauty and capturing the memory.  Its awesome when one can do both, but sometimes you have to make choices when the two approaches are in conflict.        

As a result, my theme album layouts seem to take me longer than most layouts.  Indeed, there are still a couple of months where I haven’t posted my layouts in the gallery.  These unfinished pages are still sitting in my ‘In Progress’ folder in a perpetual ‘tweaking’ state! 

So, I’m sharing this with you in case any of you are having similar difficulties.  Just know that sometimes the most important pages to scrap, are not the easiest pages to scrap.  So, if you’ve dropped out or are behind, please know that I’m struggling and I’m behind too.

On the other hand, this is all the more reason why I’m so thankful for the Theme Album Challenge.  If it wasn’t for this challenge, I’d probably never scrap these old birthday photos. I’m quite certain that I’d just continue to scrap random photos while ignoring the ‘milestone’ and ‘event’ layouts.  This challenge gives me a due date, so to speak.   I am very willing to endure a little bit of a struggle each month, knowing how great the reward will be when my daughter sees her Birthday album for the very first time!

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This month, I want to highlight an album that I’ve enjoyed through the months.  It’s Melissa’s (aka mshanhun) Home Renovation album.   This is a great example to show that a Theme album doesn’t need to be restricted to one color scheme or limited to a certain kit.  Each page in Melissa’s album was created using colors and styles to fit the topic, yet the whole album is cohesive because it tells one story with a beginning, middle and an end.  Just browsing through some of her pages gives me a glimpse at how awesome this finished album is going to be: