By Pamela Holland 

I like to make messes.  Just ask my mother—my room is usually strewn with clothes, clean and dirty.  The art forms I like best involve a lot of mess—glass bead making over an incredibly hot flame, clay pottery (though thankfully the mess is made in someone else’s studio) and all sorts of collage, with miniature scraps of paper, bits of ribbon and other miscellany littering nearly every surface in the house.  I have dabbled in almost every art form but I always settle on those that involve sticky substances and end with little bits of paper, paint or glue lying on the floor. Most recently, I have settled on scrap-booking.  It fits the profile perfectly—glue, glitter, stickers, scraps of paper and near total freedom of expression.  In addition, I have a soft spot for the few scrapbooks lying around our house, telling of my mother’s feats as Miss Betty Crocker of Florida (for cooking and sewing) or simply crammed with photographs from when I was a child. So I bought a nice scrapbook from Crane (on sale, of course!) and began my mess-making.  I discovered that since the first scrapbook that my grandmother gave me for my 13^th birthday, scrap-booking had grown tremendously.  Scrapbook supplies line aisles and aisles of Hobby Lobby and Michael’s and even take up a good section of the art corner at superstores like Wal-Mart.  The tools and accessories are endless and the variety of colors, patterns and fonts are astounding.  But of course, in addition to all these things, I like the mess—I love creating my own letters, making little shapes for each page, and arranging and rearranging.  My passion for messy creativity is what led me to be wary of HP’s scrap-booking software.  Surely there could be nothing better than just getting out the paper and doing it yourself. 

But as I began to explore the possibilities, I noticed all the conveniences of this form of scrap-booking.  Although I would never switch all the way over to digitally creating scrapbook pages, there are numerous advantages to using the computer for the early to advanced planning stages.  Those of you who are serious scrapbookers know just how much thought goes into each and every page, every carefully chosen photo, sticker, font, and so on.  So it makes sense to map it out just as you would any other project.  Why not just get out your supplies and go for it?  For a number of reasons: To begin, overzealous scrapbook sessions have left a few of my pages looking less than spectacular.  This program allows you to plan your pages out, to the letter.  It provides backgrounds, borders, clipart, picture frames and shapes, captions, fonts and the ability to use your digital pictures or outside images.  It also allows you to create your own designs and templates in order to make it more personalized to your scrapbooking. This is not only an important planning tool but it also helps you decide how to lay out your pages before you actually purchase the materials or get prints of your photos.  Does that candy corn background not look as good as you thought it might against Hannah’s Halloween costume?  This program allows you to test out various options without the investment.  Additionally, you can forego purchasing the background altogether and print out the entire page to insert into your scrapbook (although this might not appeal to hardcore scrap-bookers). Another option is to print out the page and take it with you on your buying trips as a reference.  Furthermore, in an increasingly digital age, this also allows you to create a scrapbook that exists completely on the computer, for easy sharing with internet savvy relatives. 

Another added bonus is the fact that the earlier stages of scrap-booking can be done in the presence and with the help of young children.  As a nanny, I know exactly how trying it can be to scrapbook with children and pets around to ‘help.’  This way I can do a little scrapbooking while the kids are asleep, free of my scrap-booking supplies which are invariably usurped by the girls when I bring them over.  Additionally, the girls love to make their own scrapbook pages on the computer with a little help. The program is fairly easy to use as well.  I found my way around with no reference to the help option but when consulted, the help menu was quite good at matching my inquiry.

The program is laid out similar to other page design (or quilt design) programs, with a rectangular, portrait-oriented workspace on the screen that is your virtual scrapbook page. From a series of tabs across the top you can select your backgrounds, frames, shapes, pictures and textboxes. There is a small library of each of these, including snippets of text from well-known scrapbookers sharing their experiences of the craft. When you select “New Page” from the file menu, you are given a choice of a portrait, landscape, or square page (12’ X 12’, the standard scrapbook size), and this provides your canvas for the design. You can scan directly from inside the program using your existing scanner software, and import images for use in your designs.

Although as I said I am a connoisseur of messy crafts, and I don’t sew or quilt very much, I have made several quilts and I can see how this program would be helpful for certain kinds of quilt designs. For instance blocks for photo quilts could easily be laid out using this program, and even printed from it onto printable fabric. Shapes, words, frames and colors could be introduced to the design, adding another element of interest.

There were a few things that I would have liked to have seen in this program.  The first is that it would be nice if they teamed up with a scrapbook supplier to make the backgrounds more closely match those available for purchase.  However, many of the backgrounds are good matches to common pages I found at Michael’s or Hobby Lobby.  It would also be nice if they had a sticker option so that you could experiment with sticker placement and so forth in order to better prepare your page.  Another slightly disappointing aspect was the limited clip-art. They did have a lot of cute pictures that I had not seen before but overall selection of clip-art was pretty basic.  Once again though, this is where it can be used as more of a planning tool than something that creates a finished product.  Its main purpose is to make layout simpler and more convenient and it serves this goal well.  After all, it calls itself the Scrapbook Assistant. For me, it makes it possible to scrapbook while our kitten Leo climbs all over me but it still allows me to opt for mess at any point. More importantly for my mother, it limits the mess I create and reduces the number of little bits of gluey paper stuck to her feet.

 HP Creative Scrapbook Assistant is available at a discount in our store!