Back before Tiny arrived, I had Grand Ideas about making a scrapbook of all the photos we would inevitably take. Well, all the best photos, anyway.

M and I started one years ago of our life photos, but we didn’t get very far with it. Lost interest pretty quickly, if I’m honest.

I’m making slow progress on Tiny’s: I’m currently at least 18 months behind the photos, and I’ve now given up with having them exactly chronological. They will be by year, hopefully by season. Otherwise, let’s be honest, it’s just a lovely collection of photos on pretty pages.

I have, however, learnt two things about scrapbooking.

1: scrapbook pages are not actually the advertised size of the scrapbook. The cover is, but the pages aren’t. So my big 12×12 scrapbook, which I blithely thought would take my lovely 12×12 papers, needs me to trim down said papers to about 11.5”. Very annoying. I now have lots of 12” long strips of papers and cardstock. Apparently Real Scrapbookers don’t use scrapbooks, but the 12×12 cardstock and ‘page protectors’ (AKA poly pockets), and a binder. On the other hand, I do have a lot of 6×6 papers, which do work quite nicely on not-quite-12” pages. (I’m still not sure about all the white space in the above page, but I didn’t have a plain piece of 12×12 in a suitable colour.)

2: scrapbook kits are generally just as useful as most card kits. Lots of lovely papers, stickers, ephemera, but not much good for a beginner trying to figure out layouts, not for reasonable prices, anyway. A lot of the better ones come from the USA (like, to be fair, a lot of top crafting things), and even eBay reflects this. Can only hope talk of a Tariff War won’t affect craft supplies! But I have found some (with instructions!) so hopefully I’ll soon be upping my scrapbook-game. I just need to find the right number and size of photos for the layouts.

But I am beginning to work my way through both the photos we’ve had printed for the last year or so and the stash of papers I’ve been building for the last few years.

And, actually, I’m enjoying just playing with papers, to create pretty pages. Perhaps I ought to make a junk journal.