Designing

This is a story about the inter-connectedness of the online scrapbooking community, and the way things happen that you don't expect.

A couple of years ago, while we were in Newfoundland, I was doing some x-acto knife work for my scrapbook and started thinking of some elaborate designs that I might try. I made this frame first, and then, inspired, made this one. I posted both of them on dMarie and got lots of comments about how nice they were and how I should sell them. I didn't have the slightest idea then how I might go about selling them, so I didn't think any more of it at the time.

Then, in the summer of 2001, a nice gentleman named Dave, who was making a scrapbook to propose to his girlfriend, saw my fancy vine frame on dMarie and copied it for the title page of his album. He posted his page on the Scrapbook Addict Message Board, and got rave reviews. A couple of the ladies there also used the pattern on their own pages. I didn't know that any of this was going on until I saw this layout by Stacy on Two Peas in a Bucket.

More and more people expressed an interest in buying frames, and a friend from dMarie referred me to a friend who runs a scrapbook store and had some custom titles laser cut. So the friend of a friend referred me to Lisa at Griff's Shortcuts, a company out of Michigan that makes laser-cut scrapbook accents. I contacted her, asking about getting some designs custom made, but when she saw my frames she asked me if I would like to do some designing for her.

The laser uses vector graphics, so I got my husband to give me a crash course in Corel Draw and I started making snowflakes. I've been working at it for a few months now, designing a line of frames that should be released pretty soon. Later on we'll be doing other things besides frames. I've learned a lot about Corel Draw (which is not easy at first, but is truly an amazing program) and I've produced some pieces that I'm quite pleased with. It's been fun to collaborate with Lisa on some of these and swap ideas. Since she's in Michigan and I'm in Washington state, we do everything online and e-mail files back and forth. Isn't technology wonderful?