Best Friends and My Scrapbooking Philosophy.

You’ll be seeing this photo on a layout soon because I absolutely love it.  I took it 2 weeks ago and got it developed the other day (I always develop my photos right away).  The lighting is not great because it was dusk, but I actually like that about the photo.  My process in scrapbooking begins with my photo and the story I want to tell about it.  And I will think about it and ponder for a few weeks, perhaps sketch something out, write my journaling, etc. ahead of time before I ever pull out the first sheet of paper.  And in doing that with this photo it made me think about Stacy Julian.  One of the reasons why I love Stacy is because when I first started scrapbooking I would have put this in a photo box somewhere and felt that I couldn’t use it until I had gotten to that point chronologically in my scrapbooking progress.  However, the problem with that is that it would have taken me 15-20 years to get to the point in time where this photo came up chronologically!  But I discovered Stacy Julian and Simple Scrapbooks and she changed me.  And I don’t say that lightly.  She actually (with her philosophy) changed the way I scrapbook, changed the way I think about scrapbooking.  I stopped feeling like I had to scrap year by year in order.  Thank God (and Stacy) because that was a heavy burden to carry around.  Now I don’t worry about making my pages in chronological order.  I scrapbook whatever photos I feel like, because I CAN dammit!  haha  

I am so grateful for that change because I love this photo, I love what it says and I love what it means.  And if I were still scrapbooking my “old” way, I would have stuck it in the box and not looked at it again for years.  And by then I would have forgotten why I love the photo, I would have forgotten how it makes me feel when I look at it, how happy I am that my daughter has a best friend to spend her childhood with her, how much I miss my best friend even now right this minute, 17 years after she passed away. 

Okay, so this post actually started out with this photo that I wanted to share because I love it and look what happened.  I went off road and just kept talking about something else.  See what happened because of this photo?  That wouldn’t have happened 15 years from now because I wouldn’t remember so many things about the photo.  So perhaps tonight I will make a scrapbook layout with this photo.  And then tomorrow?  I might do a page using photos from the last date I left off when I used to scrapbook “in order”, which is way back in 2003, 6 years ago!  And I don’t care.  So there!