Product Description

In this book 60 talented women take on the creative challenge of scrapbooking the realities of motherhood, the hard work of relationships, the inevitability of aging and other real-life situations that have made them grow as people and artists. Inside you'll find:

* Layouts that exemplify the whole range of life experience, from loss and illness to births and triumphs.
* "The Story Behind the Layout" where the artists share what compelled her to create the layout.
* Page after page of inspiration and encouragement for capturing the "imperfect" slices of our everyday lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #121254 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781892127945
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Laura Solomon and Tara Governo are avid scrapbookers and founding partners of Reality Scrapbooking (www.realityscrapbooking.com), a website that promotes talk and inspiration for creating pages that reflect real life.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful and encouraging.
We all know we don't have perfect lives but when you look at LOs in the magazines you would think that there are so many lucky or perfect people. And for those who do scrap the 'real life' moments that aren't as joyful we never know what to do with them. This book gave me the courage to scrap more of the real things in our life and not just the happy moments. Thank you to all the ladies who shared with us their most personal and sometimes most difficult moments. Not only have you encouraged others to scrap theirs you also given us inspiration and ideas as to how to do it.

Using all the raw material of our lives
It's not all suns and flowers in life, and here we have 60 women giving permission to scrap about the stress of motherhood, postpartum depression, aging, death, loss - about one's own personal experience, not just the obligatory birthday and holiday layouts.

It's intense to read it straight through, both because of the difficult nature of most of the page themes, and what becomes a continuity of style with similar die-cut letters and 7gypsies-type patterned papers. Now, the kind of collage that I enjoy doing uses the good old technique of cutting up magazines, and we all know those images are copyrighted, but if you aren't going to publish or reproduce your pages, don't worry about it; you bought the magazine, go ahead and chop.

I also didn't see much of the edgier kind of person represented; most of the selections are from your scrapbooking addict or demo artist who has a traditional life with husband and beautiful (always "beautiful") children. (And if I never hear another woman describe herself as a "mommy" again, I will consider my world a better place.)

One major irritation with this book from a publishing perspective was the bound-in postcard that one could tear out and mail in to subscribe to Memory Makers magazine. Cheesy! Whatever marketing genius came up with that idea ought to be spanked and sent to bed without dessert. Look guy, we don't want magazine subscription cards in our BOOKs, OK? If you DID tear it out along the perforation, you'd have a nasty little stub left there like the wilted peel of a banana.

But these women reveal themselves, and I appreciated it. Read this book over several days at least. A good companion book to read along with it is Art Journals and Creative Healing: Restoring the Spirit Through Self-Expression, which also goes into techniques for expressing the seamy side of being human. Most of us don't need tons of encouragement to appreciate the things in life we like. It's a different story with the difficult issues, but they also represent a part of ourselves and they may actually offer more avenues for personal growth.

Real Stories
Wow. It's always hard to tell the hard stories whether it's medical or personal histories. This is a great book to inspire where to start on the real stuff!!