Online Scrapbooking: Meticulous Saratoga Springs mom takes her designing to higher level

SARATOGA SPRINGS — For Kristy Lee, scrapbooking isn't just for her kids. That is, keeping her photos of her babies and tracking her family's life.

It's a career and a showcase opportunity for her creativity.

Lee is a scrapbook designer with five children, two Internet jobs and a bunch of magazines that feature her ideas.

She designs for the Web site www.creativexpress.com on its night design team and hosts its Webcast "The Nth Degree."

She also does designs for "We R Memory Keepers" (www.weronthenet.com), taking new products and incorporating them into original pages and keepsakes.

"It's still like a dream that I get to work for them," she said. "I just applied. I'm a very lucky girl to be able to make some sort of incoming doing something that I love."

She's assigned to come up with two project ideas every month. One month she was asked to include statistics; another required that she use five photos and long strips of material. Next month she'll do cut-outs and shapes and a horizontal layout.

"The possibilities are endless," Lee said. "For a while, I was chronological in my approach, everything had to be in order. When I gave that up, my creativity blossomed.

"Now, my scrapbooking has turned me into a photographer because I need good pictures to do good pages. My husband is a videographer, so he and I are incorporating my photography into his videos," Lee said. (The couple are starting a new business called First Moments (www.firstmomentsvideo.com) that offers people video scrapbooks of their baby's birth.)

She didn't start out loving scrapbooking. In fact, she'd done very little before a neighbor introduced her to the world of bits and pieces. Pretty soon, she had her two sisters-in-law and even her father-in-law getting into the pictures.

"It's funny how going to that first scrapbook party has become this. I wouldn't have gone to Web designing. I wouldn't be so into photography. As it is, I love to preserve the quirky things in life such as all the missing socks," she said.

"I like journaling, incorporating the story. This is ultimately my journal. It'll give our posterity a glimpse of us."

Lee is serious about her craft, so much so that her children and husband know to leave her be when she's working on a new project.

"It's hard. You have to make time for it," she said. "My five kids slow me down, but they don't stop me!

Right now, the money she makes is mostly pin money.