A Year in the life of Facebook

My first venture into the world of online scrapbooking blogs was at Scrapbooks Etc.  I have often used google to search for how to's and ideas on many different things, but never for scrapbooking.  Yet, I LOVE looking through my Scrapbooks Etc magazine for ideas.  One day last month I just decided to check out their website.  One thing led to another and now here I am with my own scrapbooking blog.  Crazy!

On the Scrapbooks Etc blog they periodically have challenges.  The first one of 2010 was a year in review page.  About a week before I saw the challenge I saw an app on facebook that allowed you to create a faux scrapbook page using your status updates.  The two ideas clicked for me.  I decided to use my status updates from 2009 for the journaling on my year in review page.  I rarely scrapbook about myself, and although the pictures are still mostly of my family, the journaling is all about me...via facebook.

The journaling took a LONG time.  I went into the facebook app that created a faux page.  It randomly generated a few updates to make your page, but it also had an option to choose your own status updates. By clicking that I was able to see all my updates organized by month.  I copied them all and pasted them into Word.  The result was something like 8 pages long.  I decreased the font to...tiny, and placed one post right after another.  That helped get it down to 2 pages, but was a bit confusing to read.  In the end I found a swirl I used between each post to separate them so they flowed more easily.  I changed the font color of the months so they would stand out a bit.  Then I went in and increased the font size and color of several key updates that highlighted some important themes of the year.  I finished by finding some pictures that captured those moments.

This title was what convinced me to buy a Cricut.  I really wanted to call this page "My life according to facebook" but I did NOT want to make that title out of stickers.  So I bought a Cricut online at overstock.com.  Then I decided that I did NOT want to have to glue down each individual letter and it's shadow.  So I went to buy the computer program to weld the letters together.  I planned to buy Design Studio made by Provo Craft until I found out that it is not Mac compatible.  We are a Mac family and although I had a PC it was dying and we had just purchased a Mac to replace it.  Once again I turned to google for a solution.  That is where I came across Sure Cuts A Lot.  What a lucky find!!  SCAL does so much more than Design Studio because it does not require you to purchase cartridges.  Talk about a financial savings!!  And you can find any image and trace it in SCAL which allows you to cut anything you can find on the web (see my earlier post titled Hot Chocolate and check out my mug).  Truly an awesome product!

Once I finished I felt like my page was missing something.  I liked the colors, which I had pulled from the color scheme on facebook, and I loved the journaling and pictures...but it seemed a bit plain.  So I called in reinforcements.  I took the page to a friend's house and asked for her expert opinion.  She agreed that it needed something.  A few of the circles I had bumped up with foam dots.  We both liked that but felt it needed more.  She suggested something like glitter.  That was an idea I hadn't thought of.  I didn't have any glitter so when I got home I did some more searching on the web.  I found an article about using seed beads on pages.  I went to the store the next day and bought both.  I did a trial run with both applications and emailed them to Tara.  She (and I) liked the beads best.  So I put down clear glue and pressed as many beads as I could into it.  I allowed them to dry overnight before moving the page.  The beads added the hint of sparkle I needed to complete the page.

I didn't manage to get this page done in time for the challenge deadline (had to wait on my Cricut to arrive and then figure out how to photograph and post pictures of my layout, which lead to more google searches and new blogs of interest) but I love that I now will forever be able to remember my life in 2009 through my own words of the moment.