Meet April!

 My name is April and I'm 32 years old.  I've been married to an amazing man, Mark, for almost 12 years and we have two gorgeous daughters, Emily (10) and Madison (5).  We live in NC, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and it's beautiful here!  I could never see myself living anywhere else.

Mark is a store manager for Rent-A-Center and I'm a stay-at-home-mom.  It's something that I'm very thankful for and have really enjoyed doing.  Madison just started Kindergarten so right now, I'm going through a change because I have a ton of free time to myself!  I know it'll give me a lot more scrappy time, which I'm super excited about, but right now it's a little bit weird to me so I'm still trying to get used to it. 

I've been a steady scrapbooker for almost 2 years now.  I say that because I actually first got into scrapbooking way back when Emily was a baby.  I didn't really know what it was then though, so most of those pages were covered with pictures that had been cut with deco scissors and TONS of stickers!  I would definitely say my style has evolved since then.  I love to use a lot of browns and pinks on my layouts.  I adore punches and use them on almost everything I make.  I ink the edges of EVERYTHING...I really like the way it gives my projects a finished look.  I really love buttons although to tell the truth, I'm more of a collector than a user, which is something I'm trying to change.  Also, I LOVE paper.  I have way too much of it and still seem to buy the newer lines that come out.  I'm sure I'm not alone here though, right??  

I also recently got into cardmaking, which is awesome!  I see cards as mini layouts, just without a picture.  They are really fun to make and nice to try out new techniques on.  Plus, they give me a reason to buy stamps, and that's just fine by me.

Other than scrapping, I have a huge passion for photography.  I take tons of pictures, so many that sometimes I annoy my family members.  It doesn't matter to me though...pictures are memories, and if you don't capture them, the moments are lost.  Scrapbooking is my way of taking those pictures and putting a story with them so that we can always remember our past.  My hope is that one day, my children will look back and know how much I loved them because I took the time to create those memories for them.  And also that they don't mind moving out with 10 or 20 scrapbooks each!

So that's me.  Thank you for taking the time to get to know me a little bit.  I'm SO excited to be a part of the first design team here at The Paper Variety, and I'm really looking forward to the challenges.  I hope that you'll be inspired and want to join in yourself because it's going to be a lot of fun!

Here are a few of my favorite projects...