This post comes with a warning!!

Warning: this post contains content which may upset some readers.
I've been thinking about what is it about other people's pages that is so great, and why I wish mine were more like theirs, until it occurred to me, it's not that I don't like my pages, but that their papers are different.  That is to say, they are different from the ones I scroll through in my stash every time I go to start a new page.
So when I dropped in to my local Scrapbooking Store the other day (they had finally gotten page protectors back in stock), I knew I was going to want to buy a sheet or two of new papers.  The deal I made with myself was, if I was going to buy anything new, I had to cull some of the old!
True to my word, I pulled out the paper stash as soon as I got home.  About ten or so papers have gone into a box.  I am allowed to use them, let my daughter use them, give them away or swap them, but they are not going back in the stash!!!!  Some of them are even Basic Grey!!! (You have to understand that it like a Masterchef contestant culling their Nigella cookbooks).  Any left in the box by the end of the year will be binned!  Four sheets of paper (and this is the shocking bit) went straight into the BIN!!! 
Here's to a year of spending less and crafting more and a reasonable sized stash that can have small amounts of new supplies added regularly!

It has been a miserable, cold rainy June long weekend here.  Perfect, as it turned out, for scrapbooking a record number of pages. The secret to my speed, I think, is a couple of things, firstly feeling more comfortable in my scrapbooking skin and feeling that sometimes simple little stories really do just need simple pages. And secondly, (this will be no surprise to many people) letter stickers are really fast to use! I've gotten over the fear of using up all of some letters because, quite frankly, better to have a half-used sheet of stickers than a pristine unused sheet waiting for the perfect combination of titles that means no letters go unwasted!! This was no mean feat on my part, I mean, the word "between" used all 3 "e"s on the page for heavens sake!

I'm not saying that I'm a letter sticker convert, my sizzix fonts and letter stamps will always be a much more budget conscious-way of making titles, but it has been a very liberating weekend.

P.S. The Climb Tomaree layout was done for the Scrapbooking Challenges sketch 257