The Best of British Scrapbooking & Cardmaking

Sam is a 28-year-old SAHM (Stay-At-Home-Mother) to three gorgeous children: nine-year-old Callie, five-year-old Abbie, and two-and-a-half-year-old Tyler. Her children are the main inspiration in her layouts. She has been married to her soul mate Ian for almost six years and Sam says, "I am amazed at how supportive he has been over my scrapbooking. Ian is more than happy for me to go weekend crops as he knows that it is my valued 'ME' time." The Everetts share their home with a six-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback called Nala, who is just the soppiest dog ever.

Sam discovered scrapbooking back in March 2000 when she was on holiday with my family in Florida. She picked up a scrapbooking kit at Walt Disney World with the intention of putting all her holiday snaps in it. When she got home she was puzzled about how she actually went about scrapping the photos so she trawled the internet searching for scrapbooking sites in the UK. All Sam found was a very quiet UKScrappers Yahoo group and the Creative Memories website. Eager to learn she attended a CM home class and immediately signed up as a Creative Memories consultant in order to get her scrapping supplies at a discounted rate.

After about a year of scrapping the CM way she decided it was time for a change because she found CM was too restrictive. Also she hated scrapping in (chronological) order. Sam went to her very first Scraptastic crop in September 2001. She was amazed at all the different products that were on the market and couldn't wait to try out all the new things she bought.

For Sam, scrapbooking has been therapeutic. She discovered scrapbooking when she was suffering from postnatal depression and at a real low point in her life. Sam had always been an arty person and loved drawing. Over the years she had tried many crafts, but they always lasted only a short while before Sam moved onto the next one. Something about scrapbooking hooked her, and she could tell it was going to be something she would keep doing. Sam says, "I found that looking through all my old photos and creating my pages really helped me through my darkest months. It was my therapy and even now I know when I am feeling a little down that working on a page will lift my spirits."

Sam calls herself a fairly traditional scrapbooker. She says, "I am drawn to scrapbooking very simple pages with strong lines and colours but every now and then I do like to take a little more time and produce something a little different from my norm."

Right now she's getting a lot of enjoyment from hand cutting titles and working with foam core. She used to find handcutting titles hard work until a friend recommended cutting on glass instead of the self-healing mat that she had been using. She discovered, as many of us have, glass is just so much easier. She adds, "Another thing I am very much into doing at the moment is using very enlarged photos as I think they add such a strong focal point to the layout. With the larger photos, you can almost embellish as much as you want but it never detracts from the pictures. Since entering The Best of British Scrapbooking competition I have also begun to use my sewing machine to stitch a lot more on my layouts."

Of the layouts in The Best of British Scrapbooking and Cardmaking, Sam thinks her favourite layout is probably the layout Carefree which is of her youngest daughter Abbie. "This was one of those layouts that just turned out exactly how I had imagined it in my head," says Sam, "and that is always so pleasing when that happens. Everything just fell into place with it and all my ideas came together. I was glad that I was able to do some real heartfelt journaling on this layout which I try to do every now and again on my layouts."

While Sam's children are obviously her most scrapbooked subject, she likes to occasionally do layouts of nature pictures, and she enjoys taking nature shots with her digital camera.

Right now, Sam's layouts are not themed in albums. But that could change as recently she received some old photos of her grandparents before their wedding 50 years ago. She says, "I am hoping to start an album soon following their lives together."

Sam runs a monthly crop along with Venessa Matthews in their local girl guide hall. "We have a great bunch of ladies that come along every month to crop with us. I have also formed a close circle of friends through scrapbooking," says Sam. "We enjoy going on weekend crops together."

Sam wants other scrapbookers to know there is no right or wrong way when it comes to scrapbooking. She says, "Everyone scrapbooks for different reasons but at the end of the day we all scrapbook because we want to preserve our memories."

She cautions beginners, "Never say that scrapbooking something that you cannot do. You don't have to be creative or arty to scrapbook. You don't need loads of time on your hands to do it; surely any form of getting your photos into albums rather than hidden in boxes is a good thing. Start out simple with just photos stuck to the page and a little journaling, you can always progress from there if that is what you want to do."

Finally, Sam gives us all permission to scraplift. "Some of my best layouts have started with someone else's layout as a starting point," she explains.