I’m enjoying your questions. It’s fun to have more insight, to know what’s on your minds. Here we go with some more answers:

[ GENESIS TRIMMER }

Yes, I still use the Genesis trimmer and I still love it too. Such a quality tool and a must-have for my personal scrapbooking, card-making, and other projects (I've had mine for almost 10 years). The company is going through a huge transition right now (including a big move from Maine to Georgia), so production is on hold and they're currently not taking orders. I know that's not what you want to hear, but in the meantime, you can check out their web site & explore the product a bit. Stay tuned for when they're up & running again. It's worth the wait.

[ SKETCH COLUMN ]

For the “Becky’s Sketch” column in Creating Keepsakes magazine, I am actually not involved in the process of choosing layouts for that column anymore. This leaves me more time to “produce” (ideas, articles, classes, products, etc.). There are wonderful people with great taste involved in choosing the layouts from those that are submitted. If you’re interested in submitting to that column, go here.

We’re not looking for any one “style”. As with anything else in the magazine, we want to share a variety of styles, colors, subject matter, etc. So to answer Hildura’s question about language, I don’t think that it matters if your journaling is in English, French, Japanese, Dutch, or any other language. How cool is that? There are scrapbookers all over the world!

[ BIRTHDAY LAYOUT ]

In the June issue of CK, there is a “Celebrity Toolbox” article and there are video clips on CK’s web site for more tips on how we use our favorite tools. In my demo, you can see bits & pieces of a layout, but the full birthday layout is not shown in the video, but you can view it here.

[ RESOURCES FOR SUPPLIES ]

Stacey’s looking for the supplies I used in a project featured in my Family History Scrapbooking book. That little black “album” (it’s really just cardstock) and the foam letter stamps are both from Making Memories.

[ ALBUM COLORS ]

Our chronological family albums are all black. Our son’s albums are & will be all the same color (which is green) and our daughter’s albums are & will be all the same also (which is lavendar). I got them here. To be honest, I’m not sure they even carry “my” colors anymore, so I need to look into other options. There are a lot of wonderful online stores, so if anyone wants to chime in with great places to buy albums, bring it on.

[ LAYOUTS FOR OTHER PEOPLE ]

Amy asked about how some of my layouts appear to be for other people’s scrapbooks. That is correct. Between my books & CK magazine, I publish a lot of layouts. I don’t want every single layout that I publish to be about my family, my life, my experiences. (I have a lot of layouts in our scrapbooks that are more personal and I have no interest in sharing them publicly.) So to “mix it up”, I use photos from friends & family once in a while (especially in my books).

It’s win-win-win. You, the reader, get more variety in what you see. I still create the number of layouts I need to create without exhausting my personal stash of photos. And my friends end up with completed layouts that are done for them! It’s fun & I love the process. By the way, you’ll always know if the pictures in my published layouts are someone else’s because I always credit them with “Photos by so-and-so”.