I have been a bad girl!

I must apologize for the lack of posting on my blog for the past couple of weeks. I began the process of cleaning out my office/scrapbooking space and I have only just found a pinhole of daylight to lead me to the real world.

I admit that I have one or two extra supplies on hand. Oh all right make it three or four. Now why are you on the floor laughing so hard? Fine, I have a LOT of things in stock for those nights when I can't sleep. Or what if the store is closed and I need an embellishment............................ Hmmmmm not buying that either are you.

Yes, I am a full fledged scrapaholic with side addiction of scrap shopaholic. There I have admitted it but will I change it? Nope, not a chance. I love all the cool things that are out there to make our pages go from blah to spectacular. I love dimension, texture and the interactive aspects. I love the ability to bring things together in a combination that would never work individually,

People often ask me what a page costs me to make. I tell them that it depends on what they want to do with that page. I admit that I have never given thought at the time of construction to the cost of the page. After the fact as I am logging it into my database I sometimes shock myself. When I see that total I know why I take the time to log in each page. Trying to replicate those pages after a disaster would be completely bank breaking. However, if you can substantiate these claims with documentation and photos your insurance will cover the cost of replacement.

I heard about scrappers that logged their layouts and kept copies of the database in an off site location. When a fire struck one woman's home she was well able to substantiate the replacement value of her photo albums at $20,000 USD. This past year I had 5 albums destroyed and when I went to look up the cost of recreating one of the mini albums I was surprised to discover that I had spent in excess of $400 on 20 pages. Needless to say that album has yet to be recreated (but it is well under way in the manner of replacing the materials). In this particular case none of the albums were covered by insurance.

The other benefit to scanning your layouts is that if something should happen then you have a reference as to what the layouts looked like. I know that I have created in excess of 30 albums and can't recall what each page looks like. I would be hard pressed to tell in a emotionally charged situation to know what photos were used and how it looked. I admit there are some layouts that I don't want to recreate but there are others that I love and would.

I urge you ladies to start scanning or photographing your pages and keep track in some form of the the cost. I hope none of you ever have to endure the pain of losing your albums but I would hate to see the pain increased knowing that you couldn't afford to recreate those precious memories again. Or that you forgot about a precious memory you had scrapped already but didn't recall.

Well that is my two cents for the day --------- Hmmmm sure took a different direction from the office cleaning exploates I was going to talk about (snicker). Well those will be relayed in the days to come.

I will leave you with some of my older layouts that are seldom seen.

Photos of Me by Melina Perron - she is amazing

This captures my friend trucking career and how I like travelling with him.

This is a white on white layout with silver metal accents photos by Cindy Moleski