Three years ago I met Rebecca at a crop. I noticed that she had an entire 8 foot table to herself and she had 5 stacks of identical paper and embellishments pile on her table. I asked her why she had so many duplicate items and she responded that she has 5 children and duplicates the same scrapbook layout for each one. The pictures might change a little based on the child but the paper, design and embellishments were all the same. Rebecca told me that she buys 5 of every scrapbook paper or embellishment! At the time my daughter Kara had just turned one. I had over 100 layouts done for her first year scrapbook and never thought about duplicating the pages for myself. As a stay at home mom I did not have the time or the money to recreate a duplicate of each layout. Fast forward 3 years. My daughter Kara has been blessed with having the most wonderful preschool teacher for the last 2 years. Mrs. B. was always very kind to Kara and Colin and I always felt welcome in her classroom. I wanted to create a special gift for Mrs. B. so she could remember the last two years. I also have a separate school album that I create for each of my children. With digital scrapbooking it was so easy for me to create both!

This week’s Why I Love Digi topic is easy duplication of layouts. I created a school layout for Kara and was able to use the same layout for Mrs. B.’s scrapbook. Most of the layouts were exact duplicates but I did swap out a photo or change the journaling on a few of the layouts. Those minor changes took no time at all! Here are a few of those school layouts.

I also created a scrapbook for Colin’s teacher using duplicate layouts. Here’s one of Colin’s layouts.

I created a photo book of my Project 365 layouts from last year.

The photo book contains 53 layouts. I ordered a 12×12 photo book of my 2010 Project 365 for our family and 8×8 photo books for our parents. I definitely would not have time to recreate 53 layouts for each book! Digital scrapbooking is a time saver!