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10 Questions with Debbie Hodge of Get It Scrapped!
 Debbie Hodge is the author of Get It Scrapped!: Organize, Visualize, Create. She is also a contributing editor for Memory Makers magazine, a scrapbook teacher at her site http://www.debbiehodge.com, a work-at-home mom with an MBA, and an author with a novel in progress under her bed.
As a scrapbooker, Debbie has great storytelling abilities and creates wonderful multi-photos pages, both of which I struggle to achieve. Thankfully, she has shared her organizational processes and ideas in her book and through her online classes. Here is a little more about her: - How did this scrapbooking journey unfold for you?
I've always taken lots of photos, but for most of those years I was putting them into photo albums with no journaling. I've also dabbled at writing short fiction and even a novel for many years. When my first child was born, I wanted to save memorabilia and the stories of what was going on along with the photos and I got more intense about my scrapbooking. Just as I'd always submitted my short stories to literary journals, I started submitting layouts to magazines. Once some of those were accepted, I started submitting articles to magazines and then eventually I proposed a book to Memory Makers. I really enjoy making pages and writing about scrapbooking.
- What is your main reason for scrapbooking?
I love leaving a record, and I really enjoy the act of scrapbooking. Just as I did when I wrote short stories, when I scrapbook I figure out what my point is, and then I pick out photos and products that support my desired tone and meaning, and then I add some writing to boot. I like the process and I like having the completed pages and I like seeing my family look at and read these pages.
 You have a book called Get It Scrapped! Organize, Visualize, Create. What is the main goal of this book?
The goal of Get It Scrapped! is to help a would-be scrapbooker get her (or his) arms around the many photos we're all taking now. I present a process for figuring out which photos to use and what kinds of pages to use them on. The bulk of the book is organized around page types-Events, Everyday Life, Moments, Collections, Yourself, Leaving a Record-with very specific suggestions provided for getting each of these scrapped.
- What does your scrapbooking process look like?
I select the photos and figure out my "angle." By that I mean that I ask myself questions like the following: Is this a page that records an event with a date and names lots of photos? Is it a page that I want to have a more meaningful impact? Do I want to leave a message to others or do I simply want a record of what happened in general?
Once I've got my angle, it's time to do what I think of as arranging furniture. I figure out how to get the photos onto the page, and-as I'm figuring this out-I'm also thinking about where the title will go and how much room I'll need for journaling and where that will go.
Once I've got the furniture in place, I add the equivalent of pillows, throws, and other decorations-papers and embellishments-until I like the way it looks.
- You also have a website called "Get It Scrapped." What resources can scrappers find there?
At the Get It Scrapped! @ www.debbiehodge.com website, we have online scrapbook classes for paper and digital scrapbookers. There's plenty of support and access to teachers if you've never taken an online scrapbooking class or if you just like a lot of hand-holding. Classes cover journaling, hand-crafting techniques, digital scrapbooking, photo editing, art journaling, page design, and much much more.
At no cost, you can ease your way into the community with sample classes, Tami's "Get Challenged" Forum (right now we're doing a "Must-See-TV" Challenge Series), and Paula's Hybrid Corner (with tutorials, product links, inspiration pages and a bi-weekly hybrid challenge).
- Looking at your pages, I feel like I am reading a book. You have a way with witty titles and journaling. What tips do you have for those of us who struggle with journaling?
You don't have to start out with "a grand message or insight" and then write to it. What I find works best is to start with the photos, letting them trigger particular details, which I then write down as they come to me. Have faith in the details, and 9 times out of 10 they'll lead you to a new understanding or deeper appreciation for your subject.
When you're writing this kind of journaling (journaling that's more than a "just the facts, Ma'am" kind of thing), expect to edit it. Thus you can let everything flow at the beginning, and then go back and pick out the important bits on the second pass. I'll be talking a lot about meaningful journaling in my January '09 online class "Be Real."
- Another one of your strengths is creating multi-photo layouts. How do you choose which pictures to put on a layout? Any design tips for including multi-photos and lots of journaling?
For me, selecting photos depends, again, on my "angle." I look through the photos on my computer in a browser and try to make the initial choices quickly, starring those I like on the first pass. I then make a pass through the "flagged" photos, looking for a photo I might emphasize more than the others, winnowing down to remove duplicates, and just generally convincing myself I don't need all of them.
When designing with multiple photos, I look for ways to group photos and bring obvious order to a part of the page. This could be cropping all but one photo to the same width or same height or same overall size or it could be using a digital frame to collect several photos.
- What are some of your creative goals for 2009? Any additional books in the works?
My goal in '09 is to grow the Get It Scrapped! website. Right now our online community includes people who've been together for almost a year as well as eagerly-welcomed new folks who show up every week never having taken an online class. We read each others' blogs, play along with the games in the forum, and admire each others' pages in the gallery. The work I most enjoy at this point in my life (besides scrapbooking my own pages) is working with Get It Scrapped! teachers to shape ideas into classes that provide real value. For example: Sharyn Tormanen told me she wanted to do a class about scrapbooking holiday memorabilia, and we worked together to come up with a format for her "Souvenirs of the Season" class, a class that's as much about how to be a rich memory keeper as it is about technique and how-tos.
- What is one of your go-to products when you paper scrap? What about when you scrap digitally?
For both, it's patterned paper. I love patterned paper.
- If you could give one piece of advice to all scrapbookers, what would it be?
Every week select a photo you've just taken and write about it and keep all of these photos and writings in chronological order. I use my blog to do this (though I don't always keep it up). Months down the road, I can look back and remember the whole flow of a particular season--who we were spending time with, what our activities where, how we were feeling, where we were going-and that just makes it easy to jump in and scrap photos from that time (often lifting the journaling straight from my blog).
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