RealCrappy - Saving Negatives...or not

I was looking through my old stuff, and found this page.

I found it really ironic. It's actually not a bad page--I think it's quite cute, even now. The use of my actual negatives as a decorative tool was truly inspired.

Why was I not INSPIRED to SAVE those negatives, too? In fact, I saw this and was tempted to peel it apart to see what valuable, long chopped up picture could be salvaged!

You know, sometimes I feel really gyped by that good ol' Creative Memories company. They tried to warn us about so many things...

  • You must use ACID FREE paper! If you don't, everything will fade!
  • You must use ACID FREE glue! If you don't, everything will fade!
  • You must use OUR BOOKS! If you don't, your pages will fall out!
  • You must do 12 x 12 pages! If you don't--you suck!
  • You must scrapbook ALL your pictures! If you don't, you'll regret it!
  • BUY OUR CUTTERS! BUY OUR PAPERS! BUY OUR BAGS!
And I bought it. Hook, line, and sinker. While they were warning us, why didn't they warn us about saving negatives? Of course, doing that might have alerted us to the fact that we were cutting up our valuable memorbilia, and that doesn't make them money. I'm sure, if they were SELLING negatives, they would have told us to save them.

Ah, but it's not all their fault. I should have known better. In fact, for years, I DID keep my negatives. Despite everyone assuring me that my pages were "so cute" and "you are so creative" and "I wish I were as good as you!" I knew deep down that one day I was gonna regret this. Unfortunately, I also have a de-cluttering gene I inherited from my mother. Every now and then I'll get a wild hair to just clean something OUT. Get rid of it. Very cleansing. Most the time I don't miss it. But apparently, one day my old negatives fell on the chopping block.

I looked for them the other day, but no such luck. I found some--the ones from 2001, but nothing before that. Such a bummer. Such a waste.

Thanks a lot Creative Memories...
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2 comments:

  1. CynthiaSeptember 9, 2010 at 7:37 AM

    Actually, they did offer a product to keep your negatives in so some consultants promoted that.

    I'm just bummed that I massacred so many photos in the first place. I don't have negatives for many of mine and I'm so sad to look at the hearts, starts and flowers some of my 'creativity' created. SO TACKY!

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  2. SuzanneApril 1, 2011 at 9:12 PM

    I did keep my negatives, thank God. Last year I sent them all off to get scanned at ScanCafe.com. I liked them because I could choose which ones to keep and which ones to toss, before they sent them back to me, and I only had to pay for what I kept.

    From late 1989 to 2002, I had about 5600 negatives. I could only delete half of them. We won't talk about how much it actually cost, but it was WORTH EVERY PENNY to get them digitized.

    Now if I could just figure out how to rescue those damn Kodak Disc negatives from 1986-1989.

    And find most of the negatives from 1997. They are somewhere in this house, and have been lost since 1998.

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