I found a lot of them interesting, but #7 was particularly interesting to me as I have an interest in what names come from and in the case of France surprising to me. We have an office in France and about half of my team is there and I don't think any of them are named Martin. Might be an anomaly though. Oh and my guess about the guy with the map is that he is from the Americas as if he was from Europe he would have been to other areas there and Africa as well. I would venture to guess Northern America too but only based on statistics of how common his skin color is. This post was edited by lyfia on Thu, Jan 9, 14 at 15:00

how do you post the pictures with the message like that?

Welcome Mar! My first suggestion would be to start organizing your pictures. Most people go chronologically, but you don't have to. Some have an album dedicated to all of the Christmas' they have had, or vacation books, etc. Organization is the key. (do what I say, not what I do...) I really try to get them organized before I use them. It makes it a lot easier. I got a little file box at Meijers for about $6 and it uses hanging files. It's a little smaller than 1/2 the regular sized plastic carrying ones that Office Max and those guys carry. I can easily grab it to take to Crop Nights. I label them like "Trip to Greg's Cabin", "Karin's pregnant pictures", Christmas '99", "Y2K", etc. Then you can further break them down into specific pages if you want. When you go to start laying out pages, all you have to do is pull out a file and all the stuff is there. (I also use matchbooks, drink coasters, postcards and have them in the file) Then, when you have some organization, go to a basic scrapbooking class. I feel that this is a must. There is nothing like a hands on class for you to get the feel of how to do this. I love going to Crop Nights at my LSS because I can see others sweating out how to do their pages and I don't feel as lost. A girl across from me a couple weeks ago saw that I had misspelled "throw" on the page itself. There I was, all done with the page, but the journaling and screwed it up! She was into stamping and saved me. She took a piece of the paper I was using for matting and stamped a frame on it and I journaled onto that and glued it over the spot...now I have to justify why I spent $20 on stamps that night. It worked out great, even made the page look better than before. Oh, dear. I think I've gotten carried away again...

Rhome, I've been tweaking it a little, per your suggestions so I'm anxious to see what you think of this latest concoction. :) I like it. Really, every time I have tried to get my heart back in to doing this, it just wasn't interesting. I DID always have the concern that the space behind my bedroom would stay as is, unused. I had even contemplated on just extending my bedroom out to make a larger bedroom, but that was impractical because it would have become a behemoth, and we don't NEED a bigger bedroom. I thought maybe at the bedroom entrance putting a small set of double doors? But, do I need to keep that wall space there for the cabinets which might stick out if we put doubles there? DH likes it and that is good. He even suggested that if we put the coffee/cabinets on the inside wall, there wouldn't be space to put anything on the other side, so a nice tall window might add light and look nice. What do you think? If anyone sees something *cool* which could be added, or something that needs to be changed, let me know! Thanks!