Want to learn about some of the many mistakes I’ve made when preserving and organizing photos? Go check out my guest post at Save Your Photos, where you can learn all about what not to do as far as digital photos goes.
And be sure to come back on Thursday, when I confess the rest of my poor photo organization sins.
Heh.
The Perils of Poor Photo Organization at Save Your Photos (guest post!)
This may be cause for celebration. I finished a full year of Project Life. In a timely manner. As in Finished. Finite. Finito. Fin.
Done.
Things I have learned:
Having a plan for printing photos on a regular basis has helped me do this project in a way that I call successful. (What you call successful may be entirely different. That’s the cool thing about scrapbooking. You get to decide what your successful memory keeping consists of, no one else can define that for you.)
I suck at remembering to take daily photos, or writing daily journaling. I work best in spurts. I can do Layout a Day easily now. But I no longer feel like I have something I need to prove. I know what I am good at, I know what my style is, and I can whip up a decent page in next to no time. I don’t have to take a picture every day or write every day to capture the essence of our lives.
Plus I really don’t like having to figure out how to squeeze in vertical journaling cards with vertical photos.
Speaking of which, the part that takes me the longest? Deciding which photos to use in which pocket page. Have I mentioned that I take a lot of vertical photos?
I need to work on improving my handwriting. My family keeps complaining about how difficult it is to read what I have written. That’s partly a result of the kids not getting a lot of cursive instruction in school, and partly a result of me not taking the time to write neatly. I can’t tell you how often my Ys look like bumpy Js.
Getting my boys involved in adding their own thoughts is hard. But every time I run across a card they’ve written, I’m glad. Now if only I didn’t have to nag them to do it.
Remembering to use memorabilia is hard. Deciding where to put it in my albums is hard. Too bad memorabilia is so cool.
You know what’s even cooler?
Knowing the album is done, having a plan for the next one, and being able to start right on the next year’s book.
Look!
I’m a month into the next album already. Now that’s what I call successful.
Some days, when you’re wandering through the scrapbook aisles in your local Joann’s, you find something you have to have, even though you don’t know exactly how you’re going to use it. For me, that’s usually paper.
This paper was one of the things that reached out and jumped into my basket. I was powerless against it. As a family with a huge stash of Lego blocks, how could I not bring it home?
When you start your page based on the paper, building up from it is fairly easy. You can choose photos and story based on the colors and theme of your paper, as well as the embellishments.
What made me really happy about this page? Finally using up some of these Boy Oh Boy die cuts, that I got a long time ago while visiting my brother in California. I had bought them to go with a certain paper I knew I had back home, but when I got home, the two blues clashed so much I couldn’t use them together. Ah, the trials and tribulations of a scrapbooker.
One other thing of note before we move on for the day.
Be creative with your letter stickers. This title consists of one L, two Vs, an 8, a T and D, an X, an O, 2 Fs, 2 Ws, and an I. Some days you just have to make what you have work. Today was one of those days.
Do you have any paper that just jumped into your stash without you noticing? What are you going to make with it?
When I first started scrapbooking, you know what was hot? You know what everyone needed to have on their pages? Quotes printed on vellum. You know how often I actually used those vellum quotes? No more than a handful of times.
Well, now that total’s up to six.
After thumbing through one of the many vellum quote books I own to familiarize myself with the types of quotes inside, I perused a stack of recent photos I’ve printed to find one that would work with a quote.
The one I decided on is a tiny bit blurry, and weirdly cropped, but it works with the idea of “What is this kid thinking?”
All the other items on the page came from one of the kits I put together last spring. I have got to get cracking on those kits and use them up!
So what do you think? Does the quote add to the theme and story of the page? Do you have any vellum quote books in your stash? What are you going to do with them?
If you don’t have any, do you want some? Pick a theme, and I’ll send you a few, just leave a comment below!
I have been creating paper crafts for just about 20 years now. Well, I did do a little stamping before that, but I didn’t really start obsessing over paper crafts till 1997 or 1998. Probably more like 1998, so only 17 years, but still! That’s a long time to be collecting paper crafting supplies.
You want to hear something crazy?
I have never de-stashed. Never. The closest I got to de-stashing was giving away a bin full of scraps last year, and throwing away markers that have given up the ghost. That’s it.
You’d think I’d feel overwhelmed by all the choices and sheer amount of stuff around. But I’m not. All the random stuff is inspirational. Re-discovering old things, and using them up has become a fun challenge, especially since I’ve put myself on a very severely limited craft budget this year.
You know what, let’s spend the next couple weeks digging through my stash, and coming up with fun things to do with it.
There’s tons of wordfetti and vellum quotes and rub-on words that are begging to be used on a page.
And so many alphas that have barely been used, or partially used, and missing key letters. There’s got to be something I can do with these, right?
And how about the giant drawer full of ribbons and fibers? Surely these deserve to see the light of day again.
So many themed stickers! I’ve learned my lesson. I don’t buy these any more, unless I have a specific project I’m going to use them on immediately. But there are still tons of useful things in here. I did use some spring stickers in my PL album recently, but still! There are a lot more to use up!
And paper. So much paper. I love it. I still want more. But it’s time to use some of it up, don’t you think?
So do you think I can use these things, and still have pages that look current, or even better, timeless? Let’s see what we come up with!
And you, yes you fellow stash hoarder. Why don’t you play along, and find some ancient things in your stash to use on your pages! Come on, you know it will be fun!