I have told you all about why I scrapbook and how much I love it, but I have told you nothing about myself.  My name is Leah Matthews.  I am an avid scrapbooker and a stay-at-home Mom to three incredible children.  They are my inspiration for most of my projects, although my son is getting to the age where he doesn’t care to have his picture taken every five minutes or so.

My kids are all school aged and I have one boy and two girls.  They are great fun most of the time and they keep me busy with all their various activities.  Being Canadian, most of these activities involve a skating rink (skating lessons, figure skating lessons and hockey).

Before I was a stay-at-home Mom to the world’s greatest three children, I was an overworked and unhappy lawyer.  While I love anything to do with research and writing, I did not love many of the duties of being a  lawyer.  I am a much happier Mom since leaving my career four years ago.  Now, I have some time to indulge my hobbies, which are reading, writing fiction and scrapbooking.  My interests are most things historical and everything Harry Potter and Disney, especially Harry Potter.

I have been scrapbooking for approximately nine years.  I started for two reasons.  The first one is that my beloved sister-in-law, Jen, bought me a whole bunch of things for Christmas one year and my friend Gwen kept asking me to scrapbook with her.  A couple of layouts in, everything clicked and I have never looked back.  I attend scrapbooking retreats about twice a year on average and I scrapbook regularly both with friends and on my own.

As for my obsession about Harry Potter, I think I will let one of my layouts speak for me:

Why did I choose to call my blog “Scrapture the Moment”?  Other than being a rather clever play on words thought of by my husband, I chose this name to reflect the theme of my blog and also my personal motivations for scrapbooking.

For me, scrapbooking is mostly about capturing a moment in time in a photo and preserving it through the medium of scrapbooking.  That doesn’t mean that I am a “take the photo and stick it down on paper” kind of girl.  Not at all.  Right now my fingers are covered in  Zip Dry from my latest project, and I am wondering if the keys should have been placed at the top right corner…

I scrapbook to express myself creatively; it’s my hobby.  And admittedly, it’s my obsession.  I guess the best way of putting it is to say that I scrapbook to capture the moments, both important and common, in my family’s life. But I scrapbook the way I do to create beautiful keepsakes. Pieces my children will love and want to keep when I am gone.

Very few things give me more pleasure than to transform an ordinary blank page of card stock or patterned paper into something beautiful.  It moves me right down to my very core.  More than just recording my family’s history, this is my art.  This is my way of exploring my creative side, the part of me that often got ignored through years of school, work and young children.

Scrapbooking makes me happy in a way that nothing else does. Now… let’s get on to some projects!