Shabby Princess Does it Again!

Almost exactly one year ago, I began digital scapbooking.  I wanted to make an album for my Mother-In-Law as a keepsake of the California trip she’d taken with my kids and me the year before.  It was to be her Christmas gift.

Around August, I ordered papers, stickers, die-cuts and an album and had over a hundred photos printed.  When it all finally arrived in mid-October, I panicked.  I didn’t have enough paper to complete an entire album, most of the paper I had on hand didn’t fit the vision I had for this album and I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get all that cutting and measuring and adhering done in time to ship for Christmas.  I sat amidst piles of memorabilia, photos and papers with my heart racing out of my chest.  I’d never be able finish it.

Then I thought about some of the other resources I had at my disposal.  I had a scanner, Photoshop CS2 and a bunch of digital scrapbooking “stuff” that I’d casually gathered for a couple of years.  I looked through my digital “stash” and started getting depressed again.  All those freebies I’d collected were so far off from Disney, Sea World and Universal Studios that I couldn’t possibly make it work. 

But wait!  Google is one of my best pals and my “best pal” couldn‘t let me down in this search.  I looked for “Disney Scrapbooking” and “Digital Scrapbooking” and tacked “Free” onto my search every time.

Eventually, it paid off.  No, I didn’t find some secret stash of digital Disney elements and papers (wouldn’t that be cool?) but I did find Shabby Princess.

Shabby Princess was offering these amazing, stunning, realistic kits for free.  I couldn’t believe it.  Everywhere else I’d been wanted to be paid for kits of this quality and I couldn’t understand how someone could be so awesomely generous.  Her kits were exactly what I needed to get started and I downloaded every free kit she offered then visited her store to purchase a few more.

I enlisted my teenaged daughter’s help and these are the first layouts from both of us…

I pretty much scrapped digitally like I scrapped with paper and Shabby Princess made that so much easier.  My resistance to digital scrapbooking was that scrapbooking, for me, was about the texture and layers and the inclusion of memorabilia.  Much of the early digital elements were so clearly computer-generated that I couldn’t stand the idea of doing that in my own albums.

I keep up with Shabby Princess through her newsletter and I’ve bought almost everything in her store but I still get a thrill when she releases a new freebie.  Like this one:

If you’re a digital scrapper and you haven’t heard of Shabby Princess, crawl out from under that rock and go - NOW - to get her freebies and check out her shop.

I don’t know where I’d be without Shabby Princess but it wouldn’t include as many completed pages!

Tschüss!

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