One of the biggest complaints I hear from scrapbookers — and the most popular excuse for not trying it — is that people just don’t have enough time. It’s true; there aren’t enough hours in the day to fulfill all our responsibilities at work and at home — and devote as much to this hobby as we’d like to. Therefore, when we do get some time to scrapbook, we often struggle to make the most of it.

So you can understand why, when F+W Media was nice enough to send me a stack of scrapbooking idea books to review, the first one that caught my eye was The Busy Scrapper by Courtney Walsh ($19.99). The book’s tagline is “Making the Most of Your Scrapbooking Time.” Sound like exactly what we’re all looking for, right?

The fact of the matter is scrapbooking is only as time consuming as you want it to be; creating a layout does not have to take hours — or even days. That’s the premise of this book, which I wholeheartedly agree with, by the way.

Walsh, also the author of Scrapbooking Your Faith and a former contributing editor to Memory Makers magazine, does a nice job of breaking this book up into six chapters: “Getting Started,” “Making Art Fast,” “Preventing Madness” (always a good idea!), “Using What You’ve Got,” “Getting Tech Savvy” and “Finding Inspiration.” Within these chapters, she devotes a page to each timesaving technique and illustrates the technique with a layout created by her or several other talented designers. She also includes several boxes of “Timesaving Tools” and “Kick-Start Challenges,” which I look forward to trying.

While several of the tips in The Busy Scrapper may be familiar to many advanced scrapbookers, there is plenty to learn from here. My favorite chapter is “Preventing Madness.” Sometimes we get so into the project we are working on and the idea that we have to make it perfect, that we can’t get anything done — and things often go very wrong! This chapter offers some sanity-restoring tips that I will be sure to incorporate into my scrapbooking style.

In fact, I decided that the best way to thoroughly review this book was to follow some of this great advice myself.

On this layout, I used several tips from The Busy Scrapper: give transparencies a try (p.31), skip the journaling (p.61) and purchase product lines (p.46). I used a Hambly transparency that I’ve had for quite some time but was kind of nervous about actually using. Turns out, it’s pretty easy — and I think it adds a nice touch! I skipped the journaling – figuring the pictures, the title and the date kind of speak for themselves. And — with the exception of the transparency, a little strip of paper and two small embellishments, everything on this layout is from the Making Memories Paperie collection.

There are a lot of other great ideas in this book that I am itching to try. I found The Busy Scrapper interesting, informative and– most of all — inspiring. It made me get up from the sofa, ignore the dishes piling up in the kitchen and all the work I had to do and go scrapbook. That’s really the most important test for any scrapbooking idea book.

The Busy Scrapper is available from MyCraftivityShop.com for $19.99.