Hello Blogging World!

This is my first official blog. Hurray! I have been lurking around many wonderful blogs for some time now and thought it was time to start my own. I have learned so many great ideas from some very creative blog keepers, so thank you to all of you who have inspired me.

I have always had a passion for crafts and picture-related hobbies. I can remember as a small child looking over my grandparents' old photo albums over and over with fascination, or watching my grandmother create her wonderful ceramic masterpieces in her garage ceramic shop, or obsessing over taking pictures at every family get-together. Creativity, crafts, and the importance of keepsakes have been instilled in me from a very young age.

Although I have always had this passion, I was not official introduce into the scrapbooking world until my sophomore year of high school. I discovered my new friend's family had recently opened a scrapbook store in our community. At that point I did not know what official scrapbooking was... I just owned a few albums that I strategically kept my photos and memorabilia in... I thought that was being creative. On my first visit to her store, I did not know what to expect until I walked in. I was like a child in a candy store. Beautiful colors and textures bounced back at me from every direction as I walked up and down the isles in amazement. The were papers, pens, stickers, ribbons, tools, and scrapbook creations as far as the eye could see. My friend took me to the area were she kept her personal scrapbooks and showed me some of her creations. I was amazed... I had never seen anything like it. She then ask me, "Would you like to help me make something?" Of course I accepted, but I found myself just sitting there in amazement as she went to work. She had a gift that I knew I could achieve too.

Before I left that day I knew exactly what I wanted to do... I wanted my family to own a scrapbook store!!! Hee, hee! Yeah... that never happened. However, I did visit her store frequently during the next few weeks as I worked on a present for my mother's birthday. I collected some old pictures from around the house and snuck them out to create a framed picture collage for my mother. I am still proud of that page to this day. My friends' family was so generous in allowing me to us some of their supplies at no cost. That event lead to my now loved hobby of scrapbooking and paper crafts.