Announcement

Let me begin by saying THANK YOU! to Kimberly Powell of About.com:Genealogy. She wrote a very nice post featuring this blog and my article about vintage and ethnic themed scrapbook kits. I really appreciate your help in getting the word out Kimberly!

Next I'd like to announce that I've been invited to be a part of the creative team at Stone Accents Studio (SAS). I'm really excited about this opportunity and I look forward to all that it has to offer. Let me take a moment here to explain what this is about if I may.

The digital scrapbooking (DS) community interacts online a little differently than we genea-bloggers do. For the most part, they use their blogs to offer free scrapbook items they've created, announce and promote new kits or tutorials they've created, and chat about their personal lives. The comments on their blogs are generally "thank you" messages and " I like your kit" messages from site visitors. There is little comment conversation on these blogs compared to say genealogy blogs.

Most of the DS bloggers belong to forum groups where they offer their kits for sale if they are designers, or meet and help each other out if they are scrapbookers. Think of it as an online community where people can meet up with others who are excited about their hobby and share ideas, show off their creations, and ask for help. Unlike genealogy forums, these are very visual. A big part of what they're about is showing what they've created using a given scrapbooking kit. So you can browse for hours to get ideas of how you might layout a page or create a special effect. And if you want feedback on a scrapbook page that you've created you can get that too.

I stumbled on Stone Accents Studio Forum in its infancy (2 weeks ago ;-) and posted a message there asking if anyone knew of any ethnic and/or era theme kits. The response was quick and very positive. The thread took off and the next thing I knew I'd won a contest for coming up with the best forum thread... and the funny part is I wasn't even aware of the contest! It wasn't long after that that I was contacted by Julie Orlee (the owner and creator of SAS) and offered a an opportunity to be on their creative team. The best part of all for me is just seeing the popularity of genealogy themes in this digital scrapbooking forum taking hold. Now there's a forum where we genealogists can hang out and share what we know and find some excellent scrapbooking kits for our own family albums. Is that great or what?

As a part of the creative team for Stone Accent Studio I will be creating 2-3 layouts a month using kits designed by the members of the design team. I'll also be hanging out in the forums and making suggestions to visitors in their most popular sections, "Down Through the Ages-Eras" and "Flavors of the World-Ethnic Themes". They also have a section just for genealogy (I haven't seen this on any other forums) with 2 subsections, "The SAS Genealogy and Heritage Learning Center" and "Genealogy and Heritage Links and Research Sites". And to think this all started with my question, well, it boggles the mind. Who knew I was a such a source of inspiration? ;-)

I'm hoping you'll join me over in the forums. Please stop by and say hello and see if you can't find a great scrapbooking kit for your family album. Even if you're not interested in scrapbooking, stop by and share some of your genealogy knowledge... I know you have plenty of that!

The design team and creative team members are all making layouts (pages) to introduce themselves. Here's mine. I used Julie Orlee's kit "Feelin SAS-y", it's currently a free download on the Stone Accents Studio Blog.

Now go get creative with your genealogy!