SG: One the things I love most about your scrapping is the beautiful love story that just jumps out from the pages when you spend even one moment in your gallery. What is your scrapping process like? Do you begin with the photos? Or with the moments? Or with the products? How do you create that “mood of love” in your scrapping?
CL: Honestly I never really thought much about having a process! On a normal scrap page (non gwl) I start with a photo usually and then work to find a kit that goes with it. If I have a kit a have to use then I start there and find the perfect photo/moment to scrap with it. I never ever begin a page without my photo and journaling topic already decided. When it comes to a Grow With Love page, I obviously start with my topic and then decide my specific journaling and photos, then I go scouring for the perfect products. Sometimes I buy something brand new and sometimes I just spend hours digging through my stash!
SG: Your pages have such a beautiful balance to them and I’ve always admired your amazing use of white space and your restraint in element choices…everything seems just “right”: in composition, use of space, color. Your pages have a cluster-y feel without feeling cluttered and they have this classic look to them. Do you find yourself fiddling and changing your design and element work or do you have a solid idea of your page design before you begin scrapping? Do you have any tips for finding balance in page design?
CL: Well, this is kind of hard because it varies so much from page to page. In general, when it comes to scrapping, it’s papers that move me more than elements *usually*. It’s not so hard for me to limit my element usage usually. I like a small photo cluster because that’s just how I started out scrapping. I started with poor photos and so I would minimize the photo and I just liked the look of it. In general before I start a page I have an idea how I want it to look. Not the entire page design, but the basic clustering and paper shapes. Of course as you get going things change sometimes, but if a page isn’t coming together very quickly for me I usually scrap it and try it again with a different design.
When it comes to balance work in triangles with your element placements. It helps draw the eye and keeps things from getting to scattered. If you have every thing on one side of the page, maybe throw a little cluster on the other side just to even things out a bit. Imagine you are holding it and feeling how heavy it is on one side compared to another and that should help you keep things in check a bit.
SG: Some of my most favorite pages of yours are your All About Me pages like this one: Confessions. I’ve always admired how you make efforts to insert yourself into the story and it’s something that I struggle with in my own scrapping. How do you approach these pages? Do you find yourself writing to your loved ones? Or to yourself? Or into the cosmos? What kind of encouragement can you offer to those of us who shy away from AAM scrapping? Also, are the photos you feature on these pages self portraits? Do you have any tips for snapping good self portrait photos?
CL: One day about 2 years ago now I think, I was browsing MSA and I caught a page by one of my fave scrappers, gracielou. She was crediting it as a Book of Me page and I was immediately in love with the idea! I have always had the storytelling urge and as a mother and wife hardly any of my pages were ever about me and that day I realized that needed to change. I am part of my childrens lives and I am part of what is going to make them into who they will become so I felt like it was really important to start getting those things out there. When I right them, I tend to write them to myself. More like journal entries. For me, that’s what keeps them real and open. A lot of people hate scrapping themselves and say they have no idea what to write about or who to be writing to.
I think people should just let go and don’t stress about it to start with. If you sit down to tell your stories, don’t think and just write..on a notebook, on a blank word doc. etc. Whatever flows from you first is the perspective you should try to write from. Start with basic things like your childhood memories, what you wanted to be growing up, your first pets, etc. Then try to move on to the deeper things, like hard trials you have gone through and want your children to learn from, or all the joy you feel for the world around you and your many blessings. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right words but you should always keep it YOU.
Don’t whip out a thesaraus to find bigger words. Don’t say things that you don’t actually think trying to keep things happier or more dramatic than they really are. Just be YOU. You are who your children are going to want to know more about. You are the one they love the most.
About 90% of the photos of me that you see are self portraits. The one in the page linked up above was taken by myself. The hubby is rarely home so I improvise! LOL The best suggestion is to find good light indoors, or outside, but not in full sun. You don’t want your face to be too shadowed either. It works well inside if you face a window, but not one with massive amounts of sun shinging through. Just a well lit room. I just hold the camera away from me and shoot!
SG: I really love how, when looking at your gallery, you get a sense of each of your childrens’ personalities. how do you balance creating pages for all three of your children? is that something you consider when sitting down to do a page or do you just let the pages flow? how do you put together pages for each..do you find yourself buying products that suit a page you are thinking of or do you work from your stash?
CL: Oh goodness! This is actually something I struggle with all the time! I confess that the plethora of adorable little girl scrap goodies is so hard to resist that Stella gets a bit more pages than the boys do. It’s partially because the boys have never ever wanted to let me take their photos and Stella loves it, like any normal princess. LOL! I honestly have been spending more time trying to balance it out. I honestly do have such sweet boy stories and moments to share so when I find the perfect boy kits they are hard to resist using and I have been working on getting better about spreading the love so to speak when it comes to who I scrap. I do tend to go buy things if I have a specific page in mind…however, I am working on cutting out buying (trying to save!) so I tend to just use whatever my amazing CT’s have for me and go from there when I can.
SG: I love the photography in your scrapping and storytelling. I love the moments you capture. Each one seems the perfect detail for the story you share. How do you go about choosing what photograph to scrap? And more, how do you go about choosing what to photograph?
CL: Well I pretty much just take photos of moments. Little moments that happen around here and that make me smile or evoke some kind of feeling within me. I don’t go out often so I kind of just take photos of the kids multiple times throughout the day, which of course they do not love. *giggle* I confess there are times I have staged a photo to bring to life a story I already have planned out. Sometimes I have the journaling before I have anything else and I want to be able to represent that the best that I can. Usually when it comes time to scrap I just go through my endless folders looking for one that feels perfect for the kit/story I have in mind.
CL: You are so good with words and it’s something I have always admired. You have a way of making everything sound beautiful and moving. Have you always been so good with words and writing? Are you as eloquent in real life settings as you are with your thoughtful blog posts and things?
SG: Aww, thank you! For the longest time I never really thought of myself as “good with words and writing”; in fact, I still don’t, really. But I have always felt a pull to writing and I love all things word and language centered. I love communicating. I love writing. I love connecting. And I feel like that love, that “pull”, was planted in me from the moment I was born, if that makes sense. In a way that a love for other things was not (like mathematics, for example).
And so, as it seems to happen with most anything we really love, there has been a kind of ease to it all. In the sense that I feel comfortable in my own voice and writing “skin”. English and writing courses were always my favorites in school and I have always found myself putting pen to page in some shape or form. I love to create word portraits in my writing that really breathe life into my words and reflect what I’m thinking; I love to fill them up with “me”. And so in that sense, my writing is really similar to my communication in real life settings. I can articulate my feelings and thoughts and ideas pretty well. And I’m as wordy in my speech as I am on the page. Though I am a tad goofier in person when I’m comfortable and surrounded by those whom I love and who love me. There’s a natural ease when you’re in an environment like that and so it’s not quite as “formal”.
CL: When spending time in your gallery the thing that immediately catches my eye is your amazing photos and how full of life and expression they always are, not to mention how you edit them just so perfectly for your pages! Tell me about your camera gear and what you shoot with regularly. Also, do you build your pages around the photos you have after editing them, or do you do a page and then edit your photo to match?
SG: I have a Canon 40d, a Canon 60mm 2.8 lens and a Tamron 28-75mm 2.8 lens. I find myself alternating between the two pretty regularly. I absolutely love taking photos, but I am not gifted in that sense by any stretch of the imagination and still have so much to learn, so post-processing is my best friend in my photography. Especially with any older photos (anything older than a year ago), which were taken with my point-and-shoot camera.
When it comes to my scrapping process, I’ll pick a photo to use from the beginning of my thought process because I build my pages around the story and the story is almost always the photo. But I rarely rarely edit the photo until after the page has come together. I almost always edit my photo to mesh in a cohesive way with the design, colors and mood of my page. So if it’s a fun and bright energy of a summer page I edit my photo with color pops and keep it cleaner. If it’s a soft, ooey-gooey heartfelt kind of page, I will process my photo to echo that feeling..with a haze-yness or a softness. If there are lots of different colors “competing” on the page or if the colors in my photo just clash horribly with the page I’ve built, but it’s THE photo, I will convert to black and white so the photo becomes the focal point and everything flows nicely. Sometimes I will even take a paper from the kit I’ve used, or one that fits my mood, and clip it to the photo and have a play with blending modes to create even more cohesiveness in the page.
CL: A lot of my favorite pages of yours are loaded with the most perfect mix of elements taken from everywhere it looks like. Like your Soundtrack of our Love page or Four. How do you keep your files organized so you can mix so well? Do you go buy or snag things as you need them on a page or do you just dig through your stash to find the perfect mix?
SG: Well, I have an embarrassing scrapbooker’s confession: file organization is not a strength for me. I have toyed with the idea of getting a tagging program such as AcDSee, but have put it off and off again out of dread for the initial tagging process (because I have ummm..A LOT of scrapbooking product files). So I have a system that isn’t ideal, but works for me. I organize by designer, and then by store. And I have a “to be scrapped” folder. Which admittedly, isn’t much of a system at all is it?
And when I have a concept for a page like these..that draws from lots of different products and designers, I typically list what I have in my head before I start creating. Then I start thinking of the kits and products I have already, and I’ll jot those down as I start pulling from my stash and mixing and playing. Sometimes if I have a specific idea in mind, I will go purchase *just* what I’m looking for. Like in the case of my Soundtrack page, I searched at The Lilypad for “music” and drew from the results there that would best fit with the look and story I was creating on my page. I’m generally ridiculously slow with my scrapping and these pages do take me a long time to put together. But they are often some of my most favorites because I love to mix and match to create a cohesive and specific look.
CL: I absolutely adore all the pages you are able to make about your husband. You have a perfect touch for making the most amazing masculine pages even though I know you are such a girly girl. One thing I (and others) have totally noticed is how handsome and almost perfect your sweet hubby seems to be. Is he really as amazing as he seems to be??
SG: Oh goodness, well he will be really happy to hear this, I’m sure. Ha! Of course, I DO think he is as amazing as I’ve portrayed him to be in my pages. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have valleys in our marriage or that he is on a lofty pedestal. Because this is real life and there are bumps in the road of our relationship, we have had struggles, we have hurt each other sometimes (I have scrapped one of this such moments in my “the {epic} fight” page). But those darker clouds really are wispy and brief and, in the big picture, they are not what defines our marriage or my husband. And so I scrap about him as I think about him and hope to esteem him in real life; that is to say, I choose to focus on his better angels. I have this belief about edifying publicly and I hold it almost as a tenet in my marriage: I won’t tear him down before others and I try to consciously make the effort to focus on his good. Even in-real-life. I try to consciously consider what kind of legacy he is building in his life and what legacy I am building in mine and I hope to build that legacy in my scrapping and stories too.
CL: Your pages always have the best stories even long before we started Grow With Love. I always marveled at how you had the most perfect journaling topics. I wonder how you come up with your themes? Do you keep a journal or anything to jot things down as you think of them throughout the day? Or is it more of a sporadic thing and you kind of journal based on what hits you when you see a kit or photo?
SG:
Team: What are your favorite colors to work with on a layout?
CL: That’s a hard one because I am such a photo-scrappy….I am always drawn to the girly though, like pink and purple. I loooove a kit with yellow too though. Really like any kind of neutral with a pop of happy!
SG: I too usually choose colors that coordinate well with a photo I’m using. I do love anything cheerful and I love love neutrals.
Team: Do you believe in aliens?
CL: I do not.
SG: Nope.
Team: If you could snack on something forever what would it be?
CL: Chips and Salsa
SG: Chocolate
Team: Would you rather swim in chocolate or feathers?
CL: Feathers. It’s not nearly as messy.
SG: Me too. Feathers.
Team: Describe your dream vacation.
CL: That’s easy peasy! Some kind of totally secluded beach or private island just me and my family…but like a nice house to stay in. Where we could spend everyday in the sand but not see another person.
SG: For me it would probably be a safari minus the danger of being eaten by lions. Which sounds cheeky, but in all seriousness I love animals and so does Bugga and it would be such a joy to witness some of our most favorite creatures in their native habitats.
Team: Are you a self taught photographer or have you taken classes?
CL: I am not a photographer of any kind…but the piddling I do is all me.
SG: I don’t consider myself much of a photographer either, but I do love to learn and play with my camera. Once upon a time I did sign up for and start a class but sadly, I never did finish it. It gave me a good foundation for playing with my camera on manual though.
Team: Where do you find inspiration for the journaling prompts?
CL & SG:
Team: What is the most difficult memory you have ever scrapped?
CL: Well I don’t ever share the journaling on these pages, but the GWL Marriage came at a difficult time and made me open up and take responsibility for things that I never wanted to before.
SG: The most difficult memory I’ve scrapped is also one I haven’t shared journaling for publicly. I’m protective of the journaling mostly because it’s largely about someone else and their struggle and how it impacted me, but it was a moment when I was gripped by fear in a way I’d never experienced before or since.
Team: What is your favorite restaurant and, when you get there, what do you order?
CL: I guess I would go with this Italian place called Spaghetti’s. It’s more ethnic Italian than Olive Garden and it’s more pricey so it’s a special treat when I get to go. G and I go on our anniversary usually and I always get the backed cheese ravioli with pesto and a blue raspberry Italian cream soda
SG: I love to eat Hibachi. We rarely go because (bless her) Bugga is positively terrified of the sizzle, steam and heat of the grill. But when I do I love to nosh on chicken and shrimp and sushi and edamame. Nom nom nom.
Team: What nicknames did you have when you were growing up?
CL: I was was and still am…called Bug or Buglet by my dad.
SG: Hmm…well I didn’t really have nicknames. My family would sometimes call me “Sar Bear”, but even that was pretty rare.
Team: What’s your favorite family activity?
CL: My fave family activity is biking or we have this spot we like to hike to by the big creek in this county and we spend the day finding fossils. I am a big of fan of anything that just means we are all together and happy.
SG: I love doing anything outdoors together, I love mealtimes and simple things like cuddling in the bed all together on lazy weekend mornings or going to the park to play with our pooch, Jake.
Team: How do your hubbies feel about scrapbooking?
CL: My hubby isn’t involved with my scrapbooking at all honestly. He doesn’t really understand the process or the connections I have to people. He humors me occassionally and looks at a page and tells me it’s pretty, but that’s about it!
SG: My husband has come to understand just how much scrapbooking and storytelling means to me and what I hope it will mean for our family in a “legacy” kind of way. So he’s really supportive. I think his view has evolved from scrapbooking as simply a time-sucking “hobby” in a digital world he couldn’t really relate to personally, to something more meaningful like “ooh I can touch and hold these printed pages and see the story of our lives” . Although he wouldn’t say “ooh”.
Team: How did the two of you first meet?
CL & SG: We had to think and recount this together in chat. It’s been about 3 years now since we met online in the forums at Sweet Shoppe Designs. We would interact in forums and in galleries and Crystal sent Private Messages of admiration here and there to Sara and Sara scrapped a page for Crystal once in a fun Random Act of Kindness thread, and for about a year we admired one another, loved each other’s scrapping, and bumped into each other in the community, but didn’t really “connect, connect” until Crystal sent a yahoo chat message one day. She was really nervous to send it and Sara was totally excited to get it and in about 5 minutes all the possible “weird” was gone and we just clicked. We’ve talked pretty much every day since then.