Review: The Book of Us by Angie Pedersen

This is a Republication of the Review I did in February of this year - after my copy of the book arrived. For the sake of the Virtual Book Tour and Angie Pedersen’s visit here tonight, I am reprinting this review today.

This is by no means a full review on the new Book Of Us, by Angie Pedersen. Because I have a couple of layouts published in this book I fear that I will not be independent enough to give a quantified opinion on Angie’s latest book in her series. The series commenced with the now famous Book of Me, continued with Growing Up Me, a book about encapturing children’s Me albums. And now we have the much bigger Book of Us.

Angie’s normal format continues with this idea book - in use of textured photographic backgrounds to the pages, and each chapter having copious quotes on the subject. I love the quotes out of these books - for me the text and quotes are often more inspiring than the actual sample layouts used.

One of the first quotes I found on the first chapter brought me back to earth last night, when I opened this book. After struggling a little with my own blog writing this quote helped -

“The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all” - Voltaire.

Although Angie used it to conceptualise how a scrapbook is indeed our way of writing to the world my interpretation was into the 21st century, where my own scrapbook writing is going out to the world over the internet.My designs and scrapbooks are just another way of kindling my ideas.

So, what’s different between the Book of Me, and the Book of Us? Angie explains it well in her first chapter - The Book of Us celebrates our relationships. Relationships are about intimacy and connections between people. It’s a two-way, cause and effect process. Whereas a Book of Me may deal with your feelings on being a mother, a Book of Us will look at it from both directions - how you feel about being a mother, and how your child feels about being your child.

The book’s chapters deal with different subject matters (or types of relationships) - from our history, theme albums, perspectives, our celebrations, our love, family, or groups. There are also two end chapters on circle journals and gift albums. In fact, the entire book has numerous mini or gift albums through it. These are absolutely lovely and highly case-able as ideas and in format. The mini albums, tag albums, accordian albums, smaller journals featured in the Book of Us fit well with the concept, when trying to document relationships.

As an aside, mini or circle journals are big lately. Pinecone Press is bringing out a Circle Journal book later in the year. Many scrapbookers are looking to smaller concept albums, or mini albums as a quicker but worthwhile way of documenting things like relationships, or as gifts. I know I do. It’s always sad to see these gifts being given away, but in doing so we are moving our communication channels onwards and out of our personal family albums. Scrapbooking is going out to the world.

Layouts chosen in the Book of Us range from simple layouts on themes to complex and extremely beautiful layouts. This is all subjective to my own liking of styles etc, but Angie has managed to select a wide range of differing styles, and not just layouts which some might think of as being advanced. The ABC albums and other simpler layouts are do-able, even for newbie scrappers.

I think I am most impressed with the care and production quality taken over the photography of the published layouts and mini albums. Photos are taken close enough for you to read all the journaling with ease. Details show, and the colour is exactly right - at least for my own layouts featured.

Angie changes format a little from her earlier books. In those she provided a lot of internet links for additional resources for each chapter. Those links are no longer published in the book, but instead on her website, One Scrappy Site, under the Links area. This is perhaps a good idea, considering the volatility of links nowadays. At least dead links can be taken off her website when encountered. The links resources from Angie’s site look helpful in themselves. For instance, under the Circle Journal theme, there are article links explaining what a cj is, and how to set one up, and several links to cj galleries.

Even without these links, the book is 150 pages long, and includes many interesting subjects, ideas to use, and fabulous layouts and mini albums. This book really should be in every scrapbooker’s library. You can use it to break a scrapper’s block cycle, by ducking into the book at any point to apply the ideas. Or you can create an entire Book of Us themed album using the ideas within.

To finalise this, on a more personal basis - I simply enjoy the ability to read into other scrapbooker’s lives here. I’m sure I’m not the only one who stops at a layout and reads the actual journaling. The Book of Us not only shows that journaling in fine detail, but the photographs on the layouts are interesting too. My layouts in this book show some less detailed shots of myself (thank goodness Angie chose to put a belt across my own mugshot), and my family. Whilst my husband and I went through the book last night, I made a comment towards someone else’s layout, which has two reasonably large photos of her partner. My musings were how lovely all these men must be in real life, to allow their scrapbooking partners to publish what perhaps may not be their best portrait photos out to the world like that. My hubbie nods agreeably, for the sake of making me happy.

-Michelle Thompson (Scrapability) Feb22nd 2005 and republished April 30th 2005