Making the Most of your Scrapbook Supplies

This title from the folks who bring us Memory Makers magazine, includes many ways to use all those scrapbooking supplies in your stash to create edgy, up to date pages. Let's face it: scrapbooking is a pricey hobby and many of us are working within a family budget. This book gives you oodles of ideas, with great color illustrations, on how to stretch your stash. From shrink plastic to brads to chipboard to rhinestones to beads. And don't forget clever ways to use tools such as label makers, corner rounders, deco scissors.

With even just a few of these ideas you will make your scrapbooking dollars go farther!

And if you get inspired all over again to dig into those pages, have a look at these many other scrapbook idea books . And don't forget digital scrapbooking!

Penguin Lives

Do you like biographies? But you don't have time for the exhaustive, scholarly tomes that are often produced? You might enjoy the Penguin Lives Series, fascinating to me for their intriguing pairing of author and subject. Here are just a few examples of the many titles:

• Jane Smiley on Charles Dickens
• Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis Presley
• Roy Blount on Robert E Lee
• Patricia Bosworth on Marlon Brando

These endearing little reads (about 150 pages) offer us the talented and the great in the context of the their times and their influence on our own.

Grab one.