Scrapbooking with Toria

Toria is my oldest granddaughter. I have five other granddaughters. All are beautiful girls. Of course, I'm prejudice. Wish I had a picture of Toria -- a good picture of her. It seems that my grandchildren like to make faces when I take their pictures, and so I have few good ones of them.

Anyway, Toria is here with me tonight and we're going to a crop fest -- we're going to scrapbook from 7 to 10 or later depending on whether I hold up or not. She's a great scrapper. Tonight we're both working on projects which have a short-time due date. So, we'll be cropping fast and furiously, I'm certain.

I'm finishing the second book of my mom's family. This time, just the Evangelista cousins. I was able to copy almost 75 pictures when I was visiting Micki, who, by the way, is improving each day, and they will be going into this book so I can take it to David's when we go to Tennessee.

I had to decide whether I wanted to finish that album or work on my digital, computer generated album of our trip out west. That album will be printed by Creative Memories when it is finished, but now I'm using their Story Book Plus program to drag and drop my pictures into wonderful backgrounds, and using the various Microsoft letters for the description parts of the pages. I have to say that making an album of 375 pictures this way is much easier, but less fun, and I feel less creative, than the old-fashioned way of pasting pictures into albums and then deciding which background I'm going to use for each page. (If you click on the title, you go to the Creative Memories website.)

But given my age I want to get this completed before I can't work on it any more, and if I do it the old fashioned way, I know it would take me years, because other projects would interfere with my desire to finish the westward ho trip.

Toria is working on a project, and that's all I can say about it. It's a secret. So far she has done a wonderful job.

So, in about a half hour we're heading out with another friend to spend a night with about 30 other ladies cropping and gabbing and sharing stories about our pictures.