Dude! That's not Natural!

Dude! The girls will go through lots of work to keep things organic. They'll dry flowers and find ways to preserve items to try to make things more authentic. Dude! Get a life!

Natural things, like fall leaves, don't work without a boatload of work. You don't have time to fool with that, especially when fake ones are available.



Is it as pretty as the girl's page?

No.

But, Dude!, since when have you wanted to be all pretty?????

Dude! Go to the Dark Side!

Dude! Only the girls make all their pages all sunshine and flower and rainbows. Dude! Use the dark side!

Blue on black as the only colors on a page???? Nothing to "lighten it up"???? No cheerful colors to evoke happy feelings????



Yes. Yes. And YES!

I mean, dude! this is a scrapbook page about a cave. Of course it was dark. Why wouldn't you want a dark-on-dark page for memories of being deep beneath the earth?

Dude! Let the Force be with You!

Dude! Send Flowers!

Dude! You don't want to add flowers to all your pix in the scrapbook. But if you're honoring the woman of the house, then it's way cool.

The woman of this house was Bess Truman. The background paper looked like something she might have used as wallpaper in her house.



I cropped the pix I took, some postcards, and items from the brochure. I put these little punch-out frames around them and hung them on "her" flower-print wallpaper. For me it's like walking back into her house again.

Dude! I hope she likes the flowers I got for her!

Dude, where's the men's aisle?

So I like to take pictures and respect my family's adventures enough that I think their memories deserve something better than a shoebox. Yet, when I went into the local store to find a nice way to capture the essence of our life, I discovered that the stores assumed several things:

1. That I like flowers and ribbons and buttons and bows.
2. That gardening and grandchildren are my two greatest passions.
3. That when I look at a scrapbook I think it's fun to play "Where's Waldo?" trying to find my photos through all the garbage glued on the page.
4. That I own and photograph several cats.

Clearly, none of these things are true.

I figured that there must be a way for a man to plow through this stuff and make something worth the memories. The Scrappy Dude is a blog of that ongoing quest. Are you be man enough to join me?