Gotta get out of this Funk!

So my birthday was a few days ago, and I received some money from my parents and my mother and father-in-law. I have thinking about shaking up my scrapbooking a little lately. At first I wasn't sure what to do. I just knew I needed a change.

I was thinking of buying a Cricut because of all the hype about it. And while I think it's very cool, I can see how, for me, it could be quite costly. I am easily bored and am always wanting to learn new things and do something different. But I don't want to spend an arm and a leg. I can see how I would tie up a lot of money in cartidges I would use only once. That's sort of what I've done with stamps. I LOVE my stamps, but I'm a "use them once and I'm over it" type of person. They are just too costly (in my humble opinion) to keep this up. That's also how I am with my Big Shot. I'll use a die for a couple of cards then it just sits there and I feel guilty for ever buying it.

I thought of joining a monthly club. Since I've been buying mostly stamps and embellishments for the past 2 1/2 years (with Stampin' Up! for a year then TAC for 1 1/2 years now), I'm am desperately short on paper--patterned paper specifically. I liked the clubs but I'm a "buy what you're gonna use and only that" kinda girl so having a bunch of "extra" stuff laying around that seems like a waste--not to mention a waste of space.

So long story short. I'm getting into digital scrapbooking. I took a class at Creating Keepsakes University Kansas City (CKU) in the fall of 2005. The class was taught by the ladies at Epson, and a big focus of the class was PhotoShop Elements. I was instantly interested but wasn't sure I wanted to invest the $$$ in the software and the whole thing seemed a bit daunting.

Well, now since I'm a little older and a little braver and digital scrapbooking has evolved and not just a fad (as I had worried about earlier), I'm investing in a new venture. I purchased PhotoShop Elements 6 and a tutorial from Scrapgirls (http://www.scrapgirls.com/). It was really not that costly. PSE 6 was a little over $100 and the tutorial was only $30. So for the cost of some new stamp sets, I'm going to teach myself digital scrapbooking. I'm pretty psyched.

I'm hoping to actually be able to print my own background papers and then if I still want to physically stamp on them, I can do that too. I think I will end up being more of a hybrid scrapbooker but that is to be determined.

One of the issues that some people worry about when going digital is that they won't print their layouts and actually put them in an album. I'm not really worried about that. I'm pretty anal about that type of thing. Lately, I've been more into getting layouts completed than being creative with them, and I think that's part of why I'm in a funk.

So I'm on my way to learning something new and getting out of this funk. Yay!