Pixel Scrapper – Digital Scrapbooking Resource

**This post is made in partnership with Pixel Scrapper. Prior to writing this blog entry I was a subscriber to their site, paid for by myself. The thoughts and feelings below are my own, Pixel Scrapper is not compensating me to give a glowing review, just for sharing my thoughts about their service. **   

I have been digitally scrapbooking since 2008. It started when I had just had our second baby and I wanted a way to document our memories without ALL the mess paper crafting creates. I had been a paper scrapbooker for years and it just was not working for me. At the time we lived in an apartment and I would take up the dining room table as we did not have a dedicated home office or craft room. Making the switch to digital scrapbooking was a no-brainer. I have printed several photo books with my layouts, and I love how easy they are to store as opposed to the bulky paper books.

So, I negated the mess that traditional scrapbooking makes, but let us talk about cost. Paper crafting can be expensive. Whether it is buying new tools, albums, page protectors or embellishments, it can get costly. Do not get me wrong, in the 13 years I’ve been scrapbooking digitally I’ve spent more than I’d like to admit on software, supplies and printing, but it’s not nearly the amount I’d have spent on physical items to create the same quality of layout.

Digital scrapbook kits are priced in the range of $5-$20, depending on the kit and what is included; there are typically sales when items are released and there are great sales throughout the year that you can get some amazing deals on items. I have also subscribed to monthly kits. Once I hopped on the Project Life train, I found that I needed cards and elements and not so much a full digital kit. Again, these were not pricy and gave me plenty of options to use the kits multiple times.

This leads me to how I became a member of Pixel Scrapper. I joined Pixel Scrapper in 2015 when I was on Elif Sahin’s creative team. She is a designer there and she asked team members to join to promote her items and share our pages in the gallery. I really did not get involved much on the website, or even understand how their download system worked. I have popped in every now and then, but I never committed to joining their community, sharing my layouts, or participating in their challenges. I was intimidated by their website. There is so much to browse and make use of, I was not sure I could navigate it all.

Fast forward to 2020, I had planned to document our year – I had taken a few years off from Project Life documenting – as we were building a new home, it was going to be the Girl’s Senior Year of Marching band, the Boy was starting middle school, etc. etc. etc. Right? It was important stuff happening. I had subscribed to a monthly kit I was down and ready to “do this thing” for 2020. I did document our entire year but with the shift in life, thank you COVID, I found that the card kits I was receiving every month did not quite fit our current lifestyle.

A friend mentioned to me that she had found a few resources from Pixel Scrapper and so I took another look at their site. They offer a HUGE variety of digital scraps and you can download them for FREE! There is a daily download limit, depending on your activity level within their community, but you can download items every day for no charge. What in the world?!? I had a few items from when I first joined in 2015, but again, I did not really understand how the website worked and my external hard drive with those items took a dump on me – we will not talk about that, as I am still upset about it!

During 2020, I downloaded a few items – you can pick your choice of full kit for free, and 5 download credits per day which allows you to download 5 individual items per day. Credits do not roll over, so if I go and use all my credits today, I won’t have my 5 for tomorrow + what I didn’t use today. You can earn more credits by being an active member in the community. So I took the plunge and decided to poke my head into the forums. I introduced myself, joined in some of the games and conversations and looked at the layout challenges to find inspiration. Once I reached 25 community points, I submitted a request to post in their gallery so I could share my layouts there as well. 

I had decided to cancel my monthly kit subscription for 2021. I had a full year of the subscription and felt that I didn’t need any more pocket card kits I was just going to keep in my stash. My plan was to not subscribe to any kits this year and just use my monthly budget on kits/items as I wanted them. Pixel Scrapper offered a deal on their subscription – which includes unlimited personal use downloads daily – I figured for the $1 for the first month, what could I lose? I am now in my second month of my subscription and I can’t see a reason for me to cancel. I have found that having this subscription I am spending less! So far this month I have only spent the amount to cover the subscription costs.

Some of my favorite pages I have created recently have been made with products from Pixel Scrapper. Having a library of anything I could possibly need at my disposal has been amazing! I have made use of a lot of their recolorable items to build up my basics stash which allows me to customize items to match a layout.

Here is a few of my recent pages created with items from Pixel Scrapper.