As someone who has scrapbooked for years (including during high school, before they actually made materials for it), I found a problem when I moved out of my Mom's--I moved away from my supplies! My mom, bless her, kept my sister and me well-stocked with essentials and more. She even created a Scrap Room (which we lovingly dubbed "The Crap Room").
So, when I was cut off from my resources, I was faced with a dilemma: how would I continue my scrapbooking obsession? I came to the conclusion that I could scan in a lot of my mom's stuff and then digitally scrapbook. I tried several times to make this work before resorting to using pre-made online templates which were nice but not unique and not my own.
Then I discovered pixelscrapper.com. An online scrapping community, Pixel Scraper has a ton of materials, and they give you a free download a day, which is more generous than a lot of sites. I was going like this for awhile before I discovered the "Outdoors Assets." When I saw this, I realized I needed more than one download a day. I needed them all.
So, I became a "patron" of the site. For $10 a month, I receive unlimited downloads of some of the most amazing elements for some of my favorite pages. I use Microsoft Publisher (I know a lot of people are more into Photoshop, but Publisher is simpler to use) and I am able to complete pages in minutes rather than hours. I do sometimes miss the therapeutic aspect of actually gluing something to a page, but much less than I would have thought. Mostly, I find great satisfaction in being able to actually keep up with archiving the many photos I take.
I strongly recommend Pixel Scrapper. Below are some of my favorite pages, created mostly or entirely with elements from the site. Feel free to visit and poke around yourself!
(click here)
