Hi, I’m Shannon.
I’m a scrapbooker, website tinkerer, memory keeper, coffee drinker, cupcake appreciator, and the person behind StampinBuds. I’ve been playing with paper for more than 25 years, although if you had told me when all of this started that I’d eventually spend about 95% of my creative time scrapbooking, I’m not sure I would have believed you. I was a card maker first, but apparently I just needed a few decades and several thousand photographs to figure out where I belonged.
It all started with a really big catalog.
In the late ’90s, I was introduced to one of those big, beefy Close To My Heart catalogs. It was the kind you could sit down with for five minutes and somehow lose an entire afternoon in. Not long afterward, someone introduced me to Stampin’ Up!, and suddenly I had two papercrafting companies competing for my attention.
At the same time, I had this itch to build a website and sell something from it. I didn’t even particularly care if I sold anything. I just wanted to figure out how to build the darn thing, and obviously I needed something to put on it. So I went home, compared Close To My Heart and Stampin’ Up!, chose Close To My Heart, and StampinBuds eventually came to life.
What started as a creative hobby turned into something much bigger than I ever expected. Over the years I earned ten incentive trips with Close To My Heart and another with Stampin’ Up!, met some pretty wonderful people, taught and shared a whole lot of projects, and watched this industry change more times than I can count. My own creativity changed right along with it. I spent the first part of my papercrafting life mostly making cards, then bounced between cards and scrapbooking for years. Somewhere along the way, that balance started to shift.
I think I was a memory keeper before I knew what one was.
When I was a kid, I loved looking through the photo albums my mom had put together. I could sit and look at those pictures over and over. Sometimes one photograph would immediately bring back an entire memory. Other times I’d find a picture I wasn’t in and wonder about everything I couldn’t see. Who were those people? What were they doing? What happened that day? What was the story?
I think about that more now as I watch my own family grow and change. Between my husband and me, we have five kids, which means I have no shortage of people, moments, and stories to photograph. My three girls practically grew up alongside my Close To My Heart business, so in many ways their childhoods are woven right into the albums I was creating along the way. Now I even have four grandkids adding a whole new collection of stories and photographs to the mix.
I know the stories behind the photographs because I’m living them. I know what happened right before someone smiled for the camera, what made us laugh, what someone was obsessed with at that particular age, and all the little details a photograph can’t possibly explain. Those are the things I want to make sure don’t disappear with time.
That’s probably why scrapbooking eventually won me over. I still love the pretty paper and the creative part. Believe me, I have the supplies to prove it! But now I understand that I’m really making a place for our stories to live.
A few things you should probably know…
Despite what my website and project photos may lead you to believe, I am not nearly as organized as I appear. My desk usually looks like a paper tornado touched down somewhere between the paper trimmer and the adhesive. I prefer to think of it as a highly sophisticated creative filing system.
I love vacations, although I take absolutely no responsibility for planning them. My forever husband handles that department, including our Disney trips, and then drags me around until I have approximately ten blisters on each foot. Apparently this is our love language. I complain, put on another Band-Aid, and keep going because…well, Disney.
Coffee makes me happy. So do vanilla cupcakes with pink frosting, specifically. I’m not saying other cupcakes are wrong, but I do believe we all have standards.
Mostly, though, I love my family and the life we’ve built together. After more than 25 years of making things, building businesses, changing directions, traveling, taking thousands of photographs, and accumulating a frankly unnecessary amount of paper, I’m still here creating. And I still love opening an album and remembering. I suppose that’s what brought me here in the first place.