Spotlight on Karen

Karen Leahy (aka Scrapdolly)

I live in Poole with Nigel, my husband of 19 years, and with our three cats …. Well two cats and a Fiki monster! I am the head-teacher of a local school for 3 – 11 year olds, which keeps me fairly busy, but I still find plenty of time to scrap since discovering this all consuming hobby almost three years ago.
I love scrapping – it is a real creative outlet and there is no better way to wind down after a stressful day at work than putting layouts together. It has filled a real gap in my life and brings together my love of photography, my love of nature and my love of all things creative. Besides which – I am a teacher …… we LOVE cutting and sticking!
Discovering scrap-booking has opened my eyes to so many new things and I love trying out new products and techniques, although my layouts tend to be very simple. I tend to stick to scrapping rather than altered art and I have recently been scrapping 8 x 8 and 11 ½ x 8 as well as my normal 12 x 12. I love to scrap anything and everything, from the small, inconsequential daily events to recording family history and creating layouts about all things in nature. To me it is the perfect hobby.
Nigel is very supportive of my hobby, offering lots of useful advice as he is very artistic, and he always allows himself to be the butt of my jokes in humorous layouts. He has even completed a few pages himself – digital though … I am not letting him loose on my stash! As we don’t have children, the cats really are our fur babies and are such characters, especially Kira and Fiki, our two Bengals. The cats feature quite heavily in my layouts and I love trying to make ‘different’ pet pages.
Scrap-booking has enabled me to make some really special keepsake gifts and albums for family and friends. It has also opened opportunities for me to extend the enjoyment of my hobby by teaching at local crops and thus making even more scrapping friends than I have made on line. I have been proud to have been on several design teams for magazines and on the design team for the UK's largest scrapbooking forum. I have recently joined with other British Scrapbookers to form the design Collective, offering on line scrapbooking classes. I am proud to be a member of Jillybeans design team, working with the gorgeous kits she sends out and having my work showcased on her site. I also have a scrapping blog where you can see my work and read my general daily ramblings http://dollysdreamings.typepad.com/
Scrapbooking is such a wonderful and all consuming hobby and I would go so far as to say that, for me, it is more than a hobby – it is a way of life.
the page I have included is an older one but it seems to sum up me, my style and my love of scrapping. It is a picture of me looking at albums of me and my parents with a lot of smaller pictures of us at various stages in my growing up. Scrapping for me is about recording those memories we all have and about remembering the love.