As a professional scrapbooker, I want to make sure that my clients get books and/or pages from me that they couldn't get anywhere else.

A unique page is a joy.

Making that unique page is another matter. There are so many paper lines, embellishments, stickers and stamps out there that it is easy to make pages that look like ones that other scrappers have already made. We all saw this recently with the Wild Asparagus and Magnolia lines of paper by My Minds Eye. I know that personally I couldn't wait to get my hands on both 180 page pads of paper. I thought I had died and gone to heaven when I finally bought them.

Therein lies the problem. Everyone bought them. For a while, they were THE papers to have. The Wild Asparagus wasn't so bad. You could mix that in with other paper lines and no one was the wiser. I still use it. The Magnolia, however, was flawed by its own beauty and distinctiveness. If you see pages or books made with Magnolia paper, you recognize it immediately and except for a certain number of pages in the pad, these papers need to be used together. They were made to be used that way and are undeniably gorgeous, they were just a bit too unique, yet too widely distributed. I still have a book laid out to be made with this paper, but it is hard to sell books that have been done to death, so I haven't finished it.

What is the remedy for this? Well, for one thing, I started buying papers from collections like Basic Grey. Their papers are stunning, but the kicker is that you pay around twenty dollars for a pack of 20 papers. With fewer people able to afford them, the market isn't saturated with them - and wow are they pretty!

I also started creating my own papers using custom stamps. I use inexpensive foam sheets and a wood burning tool to design unique stamps to create papers no one else has. It keeps my work fresh and fun.

Find ways to stay unique. Keep scrapping!

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