Hello,

My name is Joelle, I am 38, french and I live in Lyon which is the second biggest city after Paris(not very far from the switzerland border).

I came back to France on last june, after beeing stayed 15 months in South Carolina with my husband and our 3 boys (10, 7 and 3 1/2) for my husband company.

During this time, I discovered scrapbooking, because I wanted to realize something special for each of my kids, remembering our experience in USA. I began one album for each of them and decided to continue once back in France. I made a very big one (more than 100 pages) for the whole family between august and november, then began another one about our family events here. (I have many ideas but not really time to do).

You have to know that in France, scrapbooking is almost completely unknown, except from some people coming back from USA, and finding out tools or acid-free stuff is very difficult, sometimes impossible!

I brought back some papers, die-cut and stickers, but was wondering how I could practice scrapbooking once at home.

So I was really surprised, when one of my best friend asked me in July if I knew scrapbooking, because she had discovered that on a exhibit and was really interested by.

After a couple of weeks, I met the girl who had introduced her to scrapbooking ( she had spent 4 years in New England), at a PTO meeting at my boys'school, because her son and mine were attending the same international school in Lyon. She teaches scrapbooking in Lyon and my friend began to teach too in his village at 30 miles from Lyon.

(In my case I work as a computer engineer, so I just try to find some other scrapbooking lovers!)

More and more people seem to be interested, and we would like to know if other people in France practice scrapbooking.

I opened a web site in december to try to get in touch with some people, (it explains what is scrapbooking, where to find some tools, gives web adresses, a link to a forum...) and I recently opened a forum in French, but the internet is less used in France than in USA, and it seems to be difficult to reach people.

I think that maybe some people in France (maybe elsewhere in Europe) may search on an american forum, or some french people in USA would be interested to know that we do exist and try to develop scrapbooking in France, so if you are in this case, let me know, and if not, I would be pleased anyway to comunicate with "hooked" people.

I hope this message will be usefull, and like australian or canadian people, I think you are really lucky in USA to be able to practice your favorite hobby so easily (when the first scrapbooking convention in France ?)

Nice to meet you girls, and good night because it is pretty late here (about midnight!)

Joelle