By Brandon Hill on May 10, 2013 • ( 1 Comment )

2007: A New Start

I am about to begin a new series on a new start. Before I begin sharing scrapbook pages from this new start I have to share the story of our family.

I am a single person who felt the call to adopt many years ago while I was in college. After beginning a career and finishing advanced education, I felt that I was finally at a time when I could start to fulfill this call on my life. I was living in California at the time, a State that allows single males to adopt, and had gone through 11 months of training and 4 months of waiting for a match.

Then, one day in April 2007 I got the call that I had been waiting for for a long time – there was a child that they thought would be a good match. I heard his story over the phone, and then agreed to go in to the agency to hear more, and at that point in time they shared a picture with me of the wonderful person who was to become my son. And that picture is the highlight of the page below:

2007: First Picture

In order to protect my son’s privacy you will notice that I have blocked out his name in this series. This picture is very special to me, since it is the first picture I ever had of my son, and every time I see it I am reminded of the great love I felt for him and that very moment.

My son is the reason that I scrapbook, I want to capture all of our memories together for him, so that as he grows older he can look back and remember all of the things that we have done together. In fact, many of the first 150 posts in this blog have all been about the amazing adventures that we have had together.

So, naturally because this is some of my early independent work (My mother assisted me with my Europe Vacation albums), you will notice that my skill level is at beginner stage, and that I have greatly varied technique and style, as I try to discover what my own unique style is, and my preferred methods.

For this page I tried a new technique of embossing a pattern on the border of the picture using a Sizzix Big Shot machine. Basically you feed a piece of paper and an embossing pattern card through the machine and it presses the pattern right into the paper.

I also used several store bought stickers, and I did this as I had not yet figured out how to fill space better. I probably would not do this page this way again, but I do like the playful nature that the stickers and sayings bring to this page.

Find out More about Adoption: