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Who's Missing?

Ramie Ahlstrom - Scrapping Design Team Leader

When friends and family look through your scrapbooks, do they often ask where the pictures of you are? What will future generations know about you? After all, most of us spend hours upon hours creating timeless keepsake albums for our family members, and rarely include ourselves. There is, of course, the annual Christmas photo in most family albums, but how many of you have scrap booked a page (or two) just about you?

Scrapbooking about yourself is just as important as covering the family and all the events of the year. Angie Pedersen has written a fantastic book on the subject, titled The Book of Me: A Guide To Scrapbooking About Yourself (Please see Sharon Caldwell’s review of the book, in the Ships Library, for more information.)

This book was the base for Volume Three of the Pops (Yahoo Group) Girlfriends Album. The Girlfriends Album is an album put together every year, with pages submitted from the Pops Girlfriends. It’s a group of about 50, and we usually get at least half of them to participate! Everyone sends in a page, or a 2-page layout, and the hostess makes copies, swaps them all out (so we each end up with one page from everyone), and then returns them. The only requirement placed on the participants this year was to create a page about themselves, using The Book of Me as inspiration.

This year, we had 32 participants... our biggest turnout ever!!!!
Here are the layouts: (Select any artwork for larger view of that entire row)

Barbara-Oregon	Betsy-Tennessee	Dawn-Wisconsin	Debbie-England
Diana-Washington	Dru-Utah	Gayle-South Carolina	Jackie-Michigan
Jennie-Arkansas	Kelly-Nevada	Kim-Canada	Laura-Canada
Linda-California	Lorinda-Nevada	Marie-Georgia	Marilyn-California
Marnea-Maryland	Pat-New York	Ramie-Colorado	Sara-Florida
Shirley-California	Stacie-Texas	Tammy-Maryland	Tara-Massachusetts
Tracy-Colorado	Valeri-Canada

What’s that you say--you don’t know where to start??

With this article, Sharon’s book review, and the Book of Me book in hand; start making a list of things that you want others to know about you. (A piece of scrap paper and your favorite pen will work fine! —heck, even a crayon will work if its handy!)

Starting with the most current stuff (you know, the stuff you do everyday right now), will probably be the easiest…but you can start anywhere really!

Your job, hobbies, and your favorites (color, food, activities, etc) are easy starting places. You might also want to scrapbook your childhood. Your hometown, or where you were raised, as well as your school and classmates are all important when describing you. Your spiritual beliefs, as well as your values, morals, and the roles and responsibilities you have are also fantastic scrapbooking topics. Friendships, relationships with loved ones and your own character are important things for future generations to know about you, and can easily be including in your “Book Of Me” scrapbook (or just as a page in your family album).

I hope that this article, as well as Sharon’s book review in the Ship’s Library, and Angie’s book have inspired you to scrapbook about yourself. You are an integral part of future generations, and they need to know about you!! So take some time to scrapbook just a little about yourself.

If you’d like to share some of your “Book of Me” style pages, feel free to submit them to the SS Reflections Reader’s Gallery. Just email them to editor@ssreflections.com, and include your name and the city and state, or country you live in!

Scrappin’ Hugs!
Ramie Ahlstrom
ramieahlstrom@ssreflections.com
Scrapping Design Team Leader
S.S. Reflections, Inc.