Hi, my name is Sharon and welcome to ScrapTown! I recently started this website because my husband found me a great domain name for my birthday, and I had been interested in doing my own website about one of my favorite hobbies for awhile. He is a web designer, so he helps me with most of the technical parts of it so that I can concentrate on writing about what I love!

I have been scrapbooking (and coming up with my own great scrapbooking ideas) for almost fifteen years now and have learned a lot over that time, which I am hoping to be able to share with you here. Please take a look around the site and let me know if you have any questions! My email is sharonbaglady (at) gmail (dot) com. Hubby is teaching me new things about being “on the web” all the time, he says it isn’t good to post your email without hiding it because the spammers will get you! lol

Throughout the Spring of 2010, submit your custom-made digital scrapbooking kit to ScrapTown.com and win! I’ll select one submission as the grand prize winner to receive a free gift certificate for scrapbooking supplies and lots of other goodies. Submissions for the ScrapTown Spring Forward scrapping contest must adhere to the following terms and guidelines:

Submission Format: compressed .zip or .rar file format
Files Included:
- Readme.txt with the name(s) and contact information of all authors involved in your kit’s creation.
- image files including papers, design elements, alphabets, embellishments, etc. must be in .jpg or .png format at high-resolution (minimum 300dpi)

Terms of Use: Digital scrapbooking kits submitted for ScrapTown contests must be entirely your own work, and you must own all rights of distribution for all graphics, images, and other visual media included therein. Any work not fully owned by you must be accredited and you must have proof of permission from the original owner to use it. By submitting your digital scrapbooking kit to ScrapTown.com, you agree to give consent for us to make it available on our website for download. We will never sell or directly profit in any way from your work or from any contest submission or personal information provided thereof.

All submissions must be emailed directly to bagladysharon@gmail.com OR, in the event of a large file size, a web link provided and sent to that email address. Submissions must be received by April 30, 2010 in order to be considered for this contest. Submissions received following that date may be included in future promotions and contests.

Thanks and good luck!

Here is the first of our free scrapbooking downloads pages. Each time we offer a free scrapbook kit for digital download, we will be focusing on a different theme. This edition’s theme is a combined Spring / Easter scrapbooking kit, with embellishments and lettering in fresh styles and muted pastel colors. This comes to us compliments of… us! In the future we may be linking to great free scrapbook kits and other digital scrapbooking downloads we find around the web, but for the first few at least we will be focusing on our own ScrapTown-produced and offered kits. I really hope you enjoy this new series and that you can put these to great use in your digi-scrapping endeavors! Thanks for visiting!

The Springtime free scrapbooking mini-kit is now available for download!

Springtime - Scraptown

Every human being has a part of the brain dedicated to memories - a storage room for recalling facts, events, and feelings we have learned and experienced in the past. It is the way we retain information and gain knowledge, both about who we are and about the world around us. Essentially, scrapbooking is a way of preserving certain memories using a visual representation of moments we want to remember from our past.

Keeping visual elements of our past is important because as our short term memory shifts into long term memory, we sometimes lose many of the sensory details of those events, as our minds only tend to store the most pertinent and relevant information as time goes by. Our minds are therefore like a somewhat leaky sieve in that they can hold a lot of information for a long period of time, but much of the information that is “closest to the edge” slowly drains away.

If you want to create the most valuable scrapbook memories that you possibly can, it may help you in your design phase to try recalling some of the sensory details that you remember from whichever event you are scrapping about. For instance, a family day at the park - the picnic you had, what you ate, the way the freshly cut grass smelled, the feel of the cool breeze, the temperature outside. This is a basic example, but what I’m trying to get at here is that the more you remember while you are scrapping about your past, the more you’ll be able to include in your write-ups and therefore the more complete your scrapbook memories will end up being.

Use these techniques to help you create great scrapbook layouts and pages. Make a list of the first five things that come to your mind about the event or person(s) you are scrapping for. Next, make a list of the five most important things to you about that event or person, ie. the way they made you feel, etc. Combining those ten things, you might just have an easier time coming up with new and more fantastic scrapbooking ideas for your future projects.