Family Life 2010 Scrapbook Complete

Amongst all of the soap news and designs, you (and I) may have forgotten that I also spend a fair amount of time digital scrapbooking, too! For each of the past 3 years I have created a big, single digital scrapbook that encompasses the entire year in its pages. I’m excited to have finished album #3 this weekend! Family Life 2010 is finally complete. Below are a few example pages, check out the full album on Flickr.

Previous years: Family Life 2009 | Family Life 2008

The Family Life albums are each between 40 and 50 pages of digital scrapbooking goodness, showing off major milestones and events that took place throughout the year. In addition to the Family Life albums, I have also created scrapbooks for other things; my nephew’s first year, my wedding, and other family albums for gifts and in memory sentiments. Not ALL of them are online, but you can find a few other completed albums over on my family Flickr account… such as our Wedding Album, the album I made as a wedding gift for Lucas, and our Christmas 2007 album; my first digital scrapbook ever.

So what on earth do I use to digital scrapbook? For those of you new to my craft blog in the past year or so with the rise of GEEKSOAP fame, you may be wondering. For those of you that have been around for several years, you know how much I am in love with My Memories Suite, the greatest digital scrapbooking software of all time. Literally. As a quick backstory, I learned of My Memories Suite back in 2007; I had moved to Canada and was waiting (patiently) on my immigration status and then finding a job. This meant I was home during the day a lot, and one day in October, I got sucked into an infomercial for this amazing new digital scrapbooking software. I’m normally pretty skeptical of infomercials, but My  Memories Suite looked like the real deal. It just so happened that I had been physically scrapbooking for years prior, and was currently in the middle of scrapbooking my Canadian adventures since moving to the great white north. The problem was that I’d run out of supplies or glue or cute embellishments or paper and just hadn’t gotten around to buying more. I had taken over an entire cabinet of drawers in our basement in Calgary with scraps of papers and various scrapbooking supplies and it was a mess. The idea of digital scrapbooking and using digital products that I could design myself or download from others was intriguing. By the end of the infomercial I had already ordered. The only problem then was that My Memories Suite was new and only available in the U.S. No worries; we were planning to visit my family in Indiana for Christmas. I had My Memories Suite shipped to my parents and patiently awaited for December so that I could get my hands on it.

The rest is history; I fell in love with My Memories Suite at Christmas of 2007 the minute I got my hands on it, and was able to quickly and elegantly scrap our Christmas trip home with family. When we got back to Canada, I got caught up and busy with a teaching job, so MMS took a backseat for a few months. But then I began working on a 2008 Family Life album with the software, determined to leave physical scrapbooking behind from that point forward. The only problem I had was that there wasn’t a lot of info out there on the software; even with the huge wealth of info on the Internet, My Memories Suite was so new of a product that there just wasn’t any good resources out there for it; no tutorials, no tips & tricks, and no additional info on usage. I decided in May of 2008 to write my personal review of the My Memories Suite software after using it for several months, and then I began creating my own My Memories Suite video tutorials on how to get the most out of the software. Over the years, I have made 5 video tutorials for My Memories Suite, which have been recognized by the company itself with great praise. (I even had the president and CEO email me over this past winter holiday as I was putting the finishing touches on a gift album I was making.)

Something interesting to note is how my albums have gotten better over the years. I’ve been using My Memories Suite since December 2007, and every year I use it to scrap my life I get better and better and there’s more and more awesome digital scrapbooking resources out there to use with the software. DigiFree, which I talked about in my review back in 2008, has since moved to Craft Crave, but they are still out there and full of awesome downloadable digital scrapping freebies every day that you can use with My Memories Suite. Not to mention, My Memories Suite itself has designers that create beautiful new kits and templates that you can purchase via the online store. I’ve got a few bookmarked in my wish list until next month when we find out whether we’re having a boy or girl so I can get started working on my baby book.

Speaking of expecting our first child, that’s what’s inspired me lately to get moving on finishing my Family Life 2010 album so that I could begin work on baby stuff. Call it nesting, call it me being organized and/or OCD, but I can’t wait to include the geekling in our Family Life 2011 album and create a separate brag book album for my family to celebrate the birth of our first child. I’ve fallen in love with dinosaurs as a “theme” (boy or girl!) and found some really fantastic scrap kits out there last night that I purchased to use with My Memories Suite. I can’t wait to start working on those layouts!

Interested in My Memories Suite? Read my review and then go and purchase it – due to my affiliation and recognition from the company for my tutorials (and I literally help a handful of people daily via email with MMS questions!), I’ve been given the ability to offer a discount if you are interested in purchasing the software! What are you waiting for? Time to get scrapping!