Necessity IS the Mother of Invention!

Absolutely, positively, without question! In this journey we call homeschooling, creativity and resourcefulness are requirements, not an option, especially when it comes to fulfilling our portfolio requirements for our beloved TMA Homeschool.  

Here was my predicament:  I had a lot of digital content for my boys' portfolios - photos & videos, to be exact.  The frugal voice inside of me warned against printing out all the pics due to the prohibitive cost of ink cartridges.  "But I could have them done at a digital print shop," I thought.  Then again, the boys didn't relish the thought of figuring out how to paste up all those pics, sigh.  As for the videos, our DVD writer was malfunctioning for the nth time, plus, it seemed so wasteful to me to use just a few megabytes of an 8-gigabyte writable DVD.  What to do, what to do?

So, as always, whenever I need inspiration, what do I do?  I surf the web, to pick on the minds of countless generous homeschooling moms - and dads! - online.  My drive to surf in times like these is fueled by the premise that whatever it is I am searching for, someone else has probably wondered about the same thing, and more importantly, FOUND the answer!

So, in a hard-copy world, what would you do with a lot of pics?  Scrapbooking came to mind, of course.  But hold on, I'm not crafty, and visions of rows and rows of cute but expensive scrapbooking doo-dads and what-have-you while a cash register keeps ringing did not appeal to me!  There's got to be a digital solution, and true enough!  I googled "digital scrapbooking", then VOILA!  I found Smilebox!

Why Smilebox?  Because it's digital scrapbooking on the fly, i.e., it's almost instant!  Have pics & videos, will scrapbook in 5 minutes, as their website says.  Some possible complications would be, first of all, how to pick a scrapbook design to use out of soooo many options.  Secondly, you'll need to provide the smart, witty & appropriate words to accompany your pics or videos.  But hey, some designs don't even require captions, so it would really be your call.

And another thing...you can actually use Smilebox for free, but... I may be a thrifty kinda gal, but I opted for membership, because of two things.  One, I tried a free digital scrapbook which, unfortunately, comes with ads, which, in my opinion, spoiled the over-all look and feel.  Two, a one-month subscription for unlimited use of Club Smilebox costs only $5.99.  I made sure we maximized our membership by finishing all the scrapbooks we needed within a month!

Curious about what we came up with?  Watch out for the unveiling of our digital scrapbooks in the next few posts! =)