Customer Reviews

Starting Points: Creating Meaningful Scrapbook Layouts From Whatever Inspires You

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Linda Harrison's book, Starting Points, was beyond fabulous. I bought the book because I've been thinking about taking up the hobby of scrapbooking and this book really got my creative juices flowing. The layouts are beautiful, but the journaling ideas are the real selling point for me. The author has created an exciting course in scrapbooking that will inspire a beginner to take up the hobby while at the same time offers fresh looks to motivate a more experienced scrapper. I would recommend this book to anyone who has a creative streak - or anyone who would like to develop her creativity.

Linda Harrison is talented and gives ideas for creating layouts from Real Life, "Everyday" scrapbooking. I marked 8 layouts I'd like to try.

Linda Harrison tries to wrap this book around the theme of starting points, the things that led her (and ostensibly you) to taking specific creative decisions in building scrapbook pages. As she says of her book, "I hope it teaches you to recognize why you want to create a page and then how to make that page meaningful and attractive based on a particular starting point". The premise is simply not a strong one and fails literally out of the box.

What this is collection of scrapbook pages, most of them quite nice. There are four sections, one devoted to using photos to start your layouts, than words, products and "other inspirations".

Each layout is shown in a good sized illustration, accompanied by an often insipid bit of advice: "It is such a teat when we capture our loved ones as we usually see them. We don't always see people perfectly posed with smiles, so why only have photos that represent that?" There are blocks headed "Technique Tip" scattered throughout with sage advice such as "To make up for fewer photos, add fun, bright and festive-colored embellishments that make a layout feel like one big party".

There is nothing about constructing the pages shown, other than a list of supplies.

In all, the works of eight other scrapbookers are shown in addition to that of the author. There are slightly over 100 layouts. They are the reason to buy the book, not the theme of "starting points".

Jerry