Imperfect Lives: Scrapbooking the Reality of Your Everyday

by Tara Governo

Images in scrapbooks often portray a picture-perfect world. Children are cute, adorable and angelic, motherhood is effortless and continuously rewarding, and marriage to that perfect man is pure... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1892127946
• ISBN13: 9781892127945
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Memory Makers Books
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 8.5" x 10.9"

Customer Reviews

changed the way I viewed my scrapbooking

I really liked this book. Before reading this book my scrapbooking was centered around making decorative and interesting frames for my favorite photos. I wanted to hilight the photos and make the subject seem more special. After reading this book I realized that scrapbooking the bad and the good is a way to capture every part of my and my families life. It would be a much better family treasure to have all parts of our lifes represented. The journal-ling which I always avoided because I didn't want the pages just to be about my thoughts; I have now come to realize would be greatly enhanced by at least a description of what was going on at the time the photo was taken. I definitely recommend this book.

Using all the raw material of our lives

It's not all suns and flowers in life, and here we have 60 women giving permission to scrap about the stress of motherhood, postpartum depression, aging, death, loss - about one's own personal experience, not just the obligatory birthday and holiday layouts. It's intense to read it straight through, both because of the difficult nature of most of the page themes, and what becomes a continuity of style with similar die-cut letters and 7gypsies-type patterned papers. Now, the kind of collage that I enjoy doing uses the good old technique of cutting up magazines, and we all know those images are copyrighted, but if you aren't going to publish or reproduce your pages, don't worry about it; you bought the magazine, go ahead and chop. I also didn't see much of the edgier kind of person represented; most of the selections are from your scrapbooking addict or demo artist who has a traditional life with husband and beautiful (always "beautiful") children. (And if I never hear another woman describe herself as a "mommy" again, I will consider my world a better place.) One major irritation with this book from a publishing perspective was the bound-in postcard that one could tear out and mail in to subscribe to Memory Makers magazine. Cheesy! Whatever marketing genius came up with that idea ought to be spanked and sent to bed without dessert. Look guy, we don't want magazine subscription cards in our BOOKs, OK? If you DID tear it out along the perforation, you'd have a nasty little stub left there like the wilted peel of a banana. But these women reveal themselves, and I appreciated it. Read this book over several days at least. A good companion book to read along with it is Art Journals and Creative Healing: Restoring the Spirit Through Self-Expression, which also goes into techniques for expressing the seamy side of being human. Most of us don't need tons of encouragement to appreciate the things in life we like. It's a different story with the difficult issues, but they also represent a part of ourselves and they may actually offer more avenues for personal growth.

Real Stories

Wow. It's always hard to tell the hard stories whether it's medical or personal histories. This is a great book to inspire where to start on the real stuff!!

Emotional and touching

This book walked you through many great thought provoking ideas. For us thinking of doing a BOM or moving past the Events, holidays, and birthdays this is pretty good.

Wonderful and encouraging.

We all know we don't have perfect lives but when you look at LOs in the magazines you would think that there are so many lucky or perfect people. And for those who do scrap the 'real life' moments that aren't as joyful we never know what to do with them. This book gave me the courage to scrap more of the real things in our life and not just the happy moments. Thank you to all the ladies who shared with us their most personal and sometimes most difficult moments. Not only have you encouraged others to scrap theirs you also given us inspiration and ideas as to how to do it.