My Absurd Scrapbooks

This project started as a way to practice scrapbooking layouts despite the fact I don't have tons of baby pics and teddy bear stickers and polka dots and pastel colored happy bright paper lying around. Face it, my "baby" is 24 years old and I'm rather fond of dark and distressed and Asian newspapers I can't read, LOL. So the Absurdist Scrapbook was born! This is the first page. It looks kinda naked compared to the rest and I'm not sure if I'm going to leave it as is or add more more MORE STUFF!!

Along the gold squiggle is written "follow the path of life."

This is the second "page" I made, using bits of cardstock left over from making CD/DVD covers out of cardstock. The clock image came in the mail that day, reminding me to renew some stupid biz mag I get for free anyway, LOL. Timely, nay? The Arabic script in the top corner is from a book I got years ago that's a Jehovah's Witness tract in Arabic...one of my favorite finds ever. The number in the corner is from an inflight magazine in Japanese. The black background paper is printed with English text and bought at a scrapbooking store.

This one still needs some work. It doesn't look as crooked in real life as the scan would have you believe -- but I do admit to being mostly allergic to straight lines, sad to say. The gold tape across the top and bottom didn't scan well.

The picture and Chinese characters come from a Chinese language newspaper available here in the Midwest. All the Chinese headlines and the pics from the first and last page as well came from one of two such newspapers. The Japanese text is from an inflight magazine. Both were given to me by a friend who knows my weakness for foreign-language newspapers.

Thai paper in the background, Chinese headline and a newspaper graphic, Japanese text and the black and red papers are different sides of the scrapbooking paper.

The fish, the globe and the strip of green in the lower left corner are from a magazine. There's some distortion in this and the next photo -- despite my straight line aversion, the purple corners aren't as crooked as the pic shows them. Honest!!

You can see some distortion in the top numbers, which along with the numbers on the bottom are from a phone number. All the other text is from the Chinese paper. The little lantern is from a page of dragon stickers, and the letter M is from a rub-on letter set also from the scrapbook supply store. I love the eyeball look of the little circle graphic.

The red on this scan is very close to the actual red in all the cardstock used for these seven pages (well, six of them anyway), but the background purple is not so red. It's very dark blue purple.