Changing the way I Scrap

The problem with having so many super cute children and being very snap happy with my camera is that I end up with so many photos that from my totally biased perspective are completely awesome and need to be printed and scrapped.
That said I find that when a little time has passed that I'm not quite as convinced that these photos all need their 12x12 LO.

And even more importantly did you see how many scrapbooks I already own.... can you imagine the storage issues I'd have if I scrapped EVERY photo I ever printed!!??

So here's my solution... drum roll please....

Divided Page Protectors....

As you can see I have a stash of these babies in different brands and different sizes and different configurations- the one thing they all have in common is that they fit happily in my 3 rind albums! (You can click on the photos if you want to see more detail)

Here's what I do....

I take one of my storage albums and have a look at a few pages worth of photo sets. (I'm working on Tama's photos at the moment) I choose the ones that don't really need to be scrapped and decide how best to put them into a page protector- and therefore which protector I need to use.

I may choose simply on chronology or I might go with a theme like smiley photos or eating photos and such.

And then once I have them grouped I choose the best suited divided page protector and slip them in.

And then they go to holding on my scrap table where I make good use of my extensive collection of 6x6 paper pads and my patterned paper scrap drawers.

To be continued...

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PHOTO BOOK-a-palooza

Thanks to Snapfish having a couple of kick-arse deals at a time when we could (just) afford it I recently got all of my 365 projects including Will's printed into photobooks and also did Les' France Album which we sent copies of to all the guys on the F3J team.

Having the 365's in a easily available format able to be just picked up is the coolest thing and taking a look back at our lives and seeing just what's changed and what's stayed the same (not much) as well as remembering some particularly special moments and people has been just the coolest thing- and totally worth the sort of money I have never paid on a single book before.

 

These books are hardcover with 30x30cm pages.

2009

 2010

 

2011

2012

Will's Book also a 30x30cm Hardcover included all of his monthly day-by-day pages as well as a selection of the 9:28 photos as a heading page for each year.

 

Les' book is a 20x28cm Hard cover book- I created 5 different variations of the books because not all of them went onto London, or did the tour of Paris or wants to have a full page photo of Les. :-) It was a mission but totally worth it and I'm super pleased with the results.

 

 

 

(Back Cover image)

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Makes Me Happy- Album Dividers

 One of the things that I am using in my Library of Memories albums is album dividers. I had a look for them online and could only find Becky Higgins Project Life ones- US$7.99 for 12! So I came up with a plan and made my own. A few years back the scrap camp girls were buying these plastic chopping mats from the dollar stores. They were using them to make templates from their die cut 12x12 papers. I brought the mats but never got around to using them until now. I cut each mat into four and used a corner rounder and crop-o-dile to turn them into dividers that I can customise to  suit my needs. And the best thing for the $7.99 I could spend on the PL dividers I can make 32 of my own dividers!!

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MY Library of Memories

A year or so back I finally got a hold of Stacey Julian's book Photo Freedom. It outlines her 'Library of Memories' system which she uses for organising and storing her photos, scrapbooking her memories and storing her pages. It category based and suits the way I scrapbook so I decided to adopt most of what she does and adapt it for my process/style. I started with my photos (mostly complete) and then dived into taking all my previously made pages (about 1000 of them) out of their albums and dividing them into categories. Then I started to put the pages into chronological-ish order in their catergories- because that's the way I like it. And then something happened and I stopped and boxed it all up and stashed it all away under my scrap-table.

Until the other week.

When I got them all out and started to file them.

Then I ran out of albums. So the next day I went to 3 different spotlight stores and brought 22 more albums. And then I spent another day and a bit putting the rest away. And now I have this.

And it makes me exceptionally happy every time I look at it- which is fairly often seeing as they are right in my lounge! I still have a little way to go with some stuff. And over time I will change things like Will's albums- so he gets some with a little more personality and so I can use his current ones for expansion in the other categories. But in the meantime it feels pretty good to have them all there are able to be viewed... because really that's the whole point isn't it?

Stacy has a whole system from photo storage and curating to album categories. Here's what I am doing...

Photo Storage: All my photos to be scrapped (or not scrapped) are in slip in albums- each set of photos has it's own pocket. I have added a sticky note on each of the set that I have enlargements for and they are stored elsewhere because of size constraints.

I have some sets of photos that are designated for mini albums and these are enveloped up and stored in a photobox.

I also have a photobox which is currently divided into sections for each of the members of our family- I'll add some more as I develop a need for them. As I work my way through my albums I come across photos that I know I'm no longer interested in scrapping or I decide not to scrap all the photos in a set- these photos will get filed into this box for 'other pages' Eg if I decide I want to do a page about the special songs we've sung to each of our kids to settle them when they were babies I can go to this box and pull a photo of each kid from their section that I want to use on the page.

And I have a drawer with all my enlargements in chronological album. 

Stacey has a category that she calls Cold Storage- essentially the photos you think you'll never scrap- I don't normally have any photos like that and if I do I generally pass them on to Will or Merenia to use as they please.

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My albums are titled:

• All About Me (Individual albums for each of the six members of our family)
• All About Us (These are for the pages that show relationships between the members of our family)
• Things We Do (Sports, Scrapping, Gliding, Theme dinners and stuff we do that isn't place specific)
• People We Love (Sorted by Les' Family, My Family and Friends)
• Places We Go (Specific places that we revisit time and again, places that are special to us eg Scrapcamp, Shakespeare Bay, Starbucks, and places that we might visit on holiday)

I also have albums for the Cats, Christmas LO's, each kid's school life, my Gifted and Talented Class, and also some themed albums like Les' Deployment to the Gulf and our big South Island Holiday).

I haven't grouped the layouts in the album (ie all the scrapcamp LO's together) I have placed them in rough chronological order. I like the fact I can flick through the album and see a different thing with each spread- as opposed to having to look at 6 years of Netball LO's all in a row. And I also like to see the progression of time in my albums.

I love using the ring bound albums- originally when they first came out I wasn't so keen to have a big gap between the pages especially in a double page spread- but to be honest I just don't see it when I look through the albums and I love the flexibility of being able to slip a page in where it belongs chronologically. I don't think the pages are as stable in the album as they are in a post bound album and therefore maybe not as kid friendly but I am happy to put up with that. I also love these American Craft albums as they have the 'no snag' binder rings.

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One of the things I really like about this system is that it lets me see the holes- the places I haven't told as much or as many of the stories as I would like to. For example I don't have a whole heap of pages about Les and Tama full stop- and I don't have many LO's about some of the important places we loved in Auckland or about the different relationships that each of the kids have with each other. 

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In terms of actually scrapping a full page LO-  I simply pull out a slip in album and flick through till I find some photos that I want to scrap then I pull them out and scrap them. I am also incorporating more divided page protectors into my albums- more on that in another post.

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For the Birds

In the most recent school holidays we had the class birds to visit. When they went back to school I put together this little book and post card set about their adventures on holiday...