Should you re-do your old pages?

To Re-do OR Not Re-do? 
That is the Question!

by Karen Lien

This past Mother's Day I pulled out both of my son's Baby Scrapbooks to look at and reminisce on that amazing time in my life.  My oldest son Jared, who is now 23 years old,  sat down with me to flip through the pages as we giggled and got a bit teary eyed looking at all of the photos and reading all of the fun journaling.  Jared's book was filled with adorable pages telling the story of his first year.  We then pulled out Ryan's baby book, my youngest who is 19 years old, and found out that his book was only 1/2 way done!  So, I told myself that I would spend my time at our next 14 hour crop working on getting Ryan's baby book finished.

As I was planning my page kits for the crop, I realized that one of the reasons I never finished Ryan's book was that I did not like a lot of the pages I had made.  I started scrapbooking about 15 years ago and some of the very 1st pages I made were from Ryan's birth.  Now, as you can see from the photo below I had a thing for decorative scissors and had taken all of Ryan's hospital birth photos and cut them into really "fun" ovals and circles!  Of course, these were the originals and after all these years I have no idea where the negatives are.  When I looked at these creatively cropped photos my heart just sank!  I know this was the way a lot of us scrapbooked back then, but I just hated what I had done to these precious photos and had to figure out a way to fix them.

I started by carefully taking apart the layout and removing the photos from the pages.  Most of them would not come up, so I had to cut around them with the old pattern paper still attached!   I then started to scan them into my computer and enlarged them as much as possible without getting them too grainy.  I needed to get the photos as large as possible so that I could then cut them down into normal squares and rectangles and "hide" as much of the decorative scissor edges as possible.  I printed them out on photo paper and was really happy with the results!

At the crop I was able to re-do Ryan's hospital layout with newer updated papers and the scanned photos.  I used a large photo corner punch to hide any edges that I was unable to crop off and matted them with complimentary cardstock.  Just for fun and a reminder to not be so hard on myself; I left one of the original photos in it's funky oval shape and added it to my new layout. 

I was so happy with the way this re-done layout turned out that it inspired me to make several more pages for Ryan's baby book and I hope to complete it at the next 14 hour crop we have in July.  So, the answer is really up to you!  I needed to re-do a few of these pages to get myself to complete my son's baby book.  I don't plan to go back and re-do any other layouts at this time; but I know that I can fix any I come across that I got a bit scissor happy with! 

I appreciate that my scrapbook style has changed and evolved over the years.  It is really fun to go back and look at my older pages and marvel at all of the paper-piecing I did; chuckle at my "only journal with fun fonts" stage and wonder where my corner rounder is from the "round every photo" trend we were all a part of!  Anyway, don't be so hard on yourself and love your early pages for what they are...the documentation of your life and your creative growth!