Smashing Good Times!

 If you know me at all you know that I love to scrapbook. I also love to spend time with my daughters, Andi and Amanda. These two girls have not shared my love for paper crafting and the art of taking hours to decide which embellishment should go where. But lucky for me, in the spring of 2011, K & Company came up with a name for a simplistic, on-the-fly, no-rules kind of scrapbooking which has been around for centuries. They named this art form SMASH BOOK. They not only came up with a name for it, but they capitalized this re-do of record keeping with their own line of books, pens, tabs, adhesives, tapes, and etc.


 So what is this 'new' scrapping phase? Did you ever have a notebook or binder where you kept your favorite photos, quotes, doodles and little mementos such as ticket stubs, chewed gum, and other random stuff? I did . . . and now someone has put a name to it. And because someone was so clever to rename this style of record keeping and make it so very enticing, I have two new scrapping buddies- Andi and Amanda.



 
So what is the difference?

One is faster, and I would say less structured and somehow less expectations to become a masterpiece. The variety of tools used seems to diminish as a person smashes verses scrapping. The biggest difference- my daughters will 'smash' where they would not 'scrap'.

Based on my own self imposed criteria for scrapbooking, these pictures of Thomas playing with my reading glasses would not have made it onto paper yet. Somehow my expectations for smashing is completely different than those I have for scrapping. Smashing has become my scrapbooking way of everyday story telling. And, isn't that what scrapbooking originally was intended for?  I L-O-V-E this page!


 
Bruce and I in Brigham City during the construction of the Brigham City Temple.

The closest the two of us got to Antelope Island.

A simple page showing off Amanda's artistic talents.

Calculations proving the value of my favorite TP.

With Smashing I tend to use flatter scrapping products. Tape, alpha stickers, more pen and a lot less dimensional embellishments. I find that the stickers and ready made alphabets I shy away from

 in conventional scrapbooking get used in Smashing.

Anything goes! Here I made use of the shopping bag my husbands birthday gift came in.
Plus I got to use tape and a banner. I find that in smashing I try out the cute 'new' embellishments which somehow never make it onto my traditional scrapbook pages. For some reason I have a hard time using banners on 12x12 pages.


I enjoy how quickly I can complete smash pages while at the same time adding some colorful creative bit to the pages. Just so you know- I did spray these newspaper clippings before adding them to my smash book.

I find that I am happy to use 'not so perfect photos' in a smash book- where if I were creating a lay out I would be frustrated with the photo quality. Smashing, for me, is a back to basics type of scrapping. After all it is the memories that really count.

Keeping it simple is a key.
 

This smash book was a notebook I had used when planning our trip to South Carolina. I liked the quality of the cover and paper, and liked the fact that it is wire bound. I tore out a few pages I didn't wish to keep and worked around the writing which meant something. From that point on I added whatever was fun at the time. It's a journal with photos. This book is full and I have since gone on to fill others.