Digi Scrapbooking

I have had several questions over the last month or so about my digi scapbooking endeavors. And I promised a blog post about it, but have yet to get around to it. Can having a newborn be my excuse for slacking?

I have been digi scrapbooking for 2 years now and love it. I always love looking through others scrapbooks and really wanted to make some of my own, however, I just lacked the motivation and let's face it, I am cheap and didn't really want to invest a ton of money in all the papers and embellishments to really make it look neat.

But that is the beauty of digi scraping once you have the right tools it is all FREE. The only cost involved is printing the pages which is roughly $1.99/pg and when you compare that to the old school scrapping that is a steal of a deal.

So what tools do you need? Basically your photos and a photo editing program. I use Photoshop Elements {PSE} which cost me around $100 for both the Photoshop and Video Editing software programs. I know there are other sites and programs out there that are more or less fancy depending on your needs. But I really like PSE and completely recommend it for the price.

However, it was my friend Erin (I am linking you directly to one of her scrapbooking posts to check out her awesome work!) who introduced me to the world of free digi scrapbooking downloads. She and I joke about how much "junk" we download. It is ridiculous and if she didn't live so far we could share better. :) Regardless, we never buy anything we get all our papers, templates, embellishments etc all for FREE!

Here are most of the sites she and I use: {I hope the links work, if not just copy and paste.}
http://www.digitalscrapbookexperts.com/ This is a "collect a kit" site where each day in your inbox you get a piece of a large kit and by month's in you have the entire kit.

http://www.freedigitalscrapbooking.com/

http://shabbyprincess.com/ --lots of cool stuff and tutorials on how to do things!

http://www.scrapgirls.com/index.htm--this one if you sign up for their newsletter you get a free element everyday. I also get a lot of layout and tip ideas from their letter.

http://www.computerscrapbook.com/free-digital-scrapbooking.html

http://www.scrappingsimply.com/--this site has some templates that are ready to go to use if you want to start there. This is also a good site to print the pages from b/c I think (last I knew) their shipping is $5 flat, other sites are mega expensive to ship.

http://www.deliciousscraps.com/

http://www.simplytiffanystudios.com/ --this one has several tutorials on how to do "cool" editing tricks.

Blogs I use:
http://scrappycocoa.blogspot.com/ --She occasionally will have free stuff and she hosts lots of giveaways (I won one just the other day!). But I get a lot of ideas from her and if you click on her blog roll you will find MORE blogs and other freebie stuff.

http://midnightscrapping.blogspot.com/ --this one has a bunch of free templates.

http://mydreamfulfilled.blogspot.com/ --everything on her blog is free to download. Just go through her old stuff.

http://digitallyinspired.wordpress.com/ --she will find daily freebies for you from other blogs (which you may find you want to follow so you can get their stuff) and post them on her blog.

It really is a treasure hunt of sorts some days and you can really get caught up in downloading stuff rather than scrapping. ;)

Once you have stuff downloaded your next step is to organize, organize, organize. Then you can go crazy scrapping! I highly recommend taking advantage of all those free templates you find because this can cut your scrapbooking time in half.

What do you do with your pages? I save them in both PSD and Hi res JPEG files on my computer. Then once a year I print them all off and put them in scrapbook albums that you can easily find in any store.


Sites to Print from:
All of these sites you can print 12x12 pages for around $1.99 each and the first two sites have a flat $5 shipping rate! But I recommend using the persnickety prints site. I received my pages in 2 days and the quality is beyond amazing compared to the last set I printed from Scrapbooksplease. Still great quality, but just more impressed with the other company.

http://www.persnicketyprints.com/
http://www.scrappingsimply.com/
http://www.scrapbooksplease.com/ (but I thought their shipping was high, but I got nice pages from them).

Well, I hope this helps some of you get started in digi scrapbooking. I am more than willing to answer any questions you have, so ask away and will gladly post answers to the questions for all to learn. But keep in mind-- I don't know everything, I probably don't even know half of all there is to know, but I love learning about it and will do my best to direct you.

I may post some quick tutorials on digi scrapbooking in the future if I can get more than 2 minutes of free time someday. :) Ah the joys of two littles.

Have Fun!

PS if you want to see my work just click on my "scrapbooking" link under the Search Me section. You will see I have come a long way from my first page and learn something new every time I sit down to scrap.