A Smashing Good Time

I got a Smashbook for my birthday, thanks to my very intelligent husband who can pick up on hints, and I am having so much fun with it. Over the years I have collected a lot of...stuff. A lot of it is hard to classify. Memorabilia? Ephemera? Magazine clippings? Plain old junk? All of that, and sooo much more! I have purged this collection several times after watching Hoarders, of course, but there are always some things too precious to part with, odd though they may be.

I scrapbook, of course, but scrapbooking has been turned into something so formal and elegant that one doesn't actually put *heaven forbid* actual scraps into the album these days. Actually, don't tell anyone, but I have been. But even if you're a wild rule breaker like me, you can only find so many reasons to put magazine clippings and straw wrappers into a nice scrapbook. And my goodness, scrapbooking takes so much time! In fact, I haven't been able to make a scrapbook page in 2 or 3 years because of the time and (worse) space it takes.

Hence the Smashbook. Finally someone has thought about those of us who don't have hours to spend on scrapping each page, and who like to include ephemera like paper napkins. Even better, they have thought of a way for us to scrap and journal ON THE GO! That's right, this book comes with a special pen (I think of it as a magic wand) that has a pen on one end and a glue stick--that actually works! a miracle in itself!--on the other. This pen attaches to the book with a loop of elastic so you can't lose it. I've had the book for almost a month now and I STILL HAVEN'T LOST THE PEN. Proof that it works.

Before I even got the book I participated in some swaps on Swap-bot to get goodies to use in my layouts. Everyone was so generous--I learned that if it says to send 10 items, you better send 20 at least! Anyway, After my birthday, I had so many materials and the fun book to put them all in, but suddenly I realized I didn't really know where to start. I finally decided to play it safe and start with an easy warmup.


I love that the book has some pages like this, where there are questions you can answer. It really gives a nice starting point for a newbie like me! And it helped me to figure out what to do with the facing page. I filled that sucker with two magazine clippings from Teen magazine--I think they were from when I was about 13! Then I added the beautiful illustration of ancient columns and the card I'd bought years ago at a Christian bookstore but never knew what to do with. Finally I added a butterfly embellishment that matched the ones I'd put on the About Me page and wrote in the text that tied the items all together.

I couldn't stop there, of course. I had to make another page! So I grabbed one of the leftover Al Capone Valentine cards and the February headline from the cover of Land of Nod's catalog (best source ever--they have great gifts for kids and gorgeous photography that you can cut out and reuse). A piece of pink memo paper served as a journaling space and I used a strip of gorgeous antique car deco tape from a lovely swapper. I used my handy-dandy Smash glue pen to glue down some pink felt flowers from another swap--they actually stayed on! this glue stick is great!--and added a "Makes Me Happy" tag sticker thingy from the official Smashbook company. Because making this Valentine, messed-up as it is, made me very happy. And here are the results.


I have several other pages in the works and several other projects going. I'm actually behind on several swaps. The one I'm furthest behind on is a swap where I'm supposed to make two spring mermaid ATCs (artist trading cards). My plan was to make cards that depicted a mermaid engaged in spring cleaning. Foolishly I tried drawing this.


Fail, anyone? I think tonight I'm going to try again, maybe using a completely different technique. Wish me luck!