Photo albums

While flipping through our daughter Amber's album yesterday I found these pictures of her from one morning when I was trying to get out the door to visit her older sisters school, it reminded me of what a handful Amber was, she never stood still, always scurrying around and into something. This is one of the reasons I love my photo albums, I can quickly flip a few pages and be inspired by something, no need to spend hours of time trying to hunt down pictures to go with a memory I have in mind, they are all at my fingertips. I have done so many layouts over the past month that I have had to take a little time and move pictures around in the albums, I am so excited that a few of the albums are almost empty!! Yepee, now to get the journaling done and get the layouts in their respective scrapbooks

Photo Storage boxes

Along with my photo storage albums I use photo storage boxes, the boxes are cheap as all get out, they run under $3.00 @. I use my storage boxes for event photo's; Christmas, Halloween, Disney trip, anything I have a large amount of photo's of that are related to each other. The boxes come with dividers that make it easy to organize with.

So here is and example of how it works, I have all of our Christmas photo's in one section, when I am in the mood to work on Christmas layouts I can just grab from the box and I have all of our Christmas photo's in one place. I have our Christmas layouts in albums by themselves, I don't feel the need to make layouts for each of our children's scrapbooks, this saves me tons of time and money. Using this system I was able to make a Christmas scrapbook for my husband who is Mr Christmas, a few years ago as a gift that had all of the scrap worthy pictures from our own childhoods along with photo's from the years we have been married (35). Now each year all I need to do is add a few pages from the current Christmas season.

I started a scrapbook for our oldest daughter a couple of years back of her own family Christmas pictures, again each year I give her a few pages to update her album with. I have to get busy this year and create and additional album for our 3rd daughter who married last year and is expecting their first little girl this year.

When you are facing boxes, drawers and bags of old photo's the storage boxes work great, just sort your pictures into categories, use the dividers, then pace yourself to go back and put each section in the order that you want to scrapbook whether that is chronological or whatever method works for you.

I am not to hung up on chronological order, for our Christmas scrapbooks I tend to have more of event pages, we make gingerbread houses each year so I have layouts of that; trips to the tree farm, baking cookies, trimming the tree, our special decorations, traditions and such. By scrapbooking this way I was able to showcase many of our family traditions from generations past. I have a layout of Bob's parents putting the angel topper on the tree when he was a baby, we still use the same tree topper so I was able to put current pictures of our own family using the topper, it helps us look back at the past and realize as much as things change they really do stay the same.

I hope all of you are making a dent in you own piles of pictures you are sorting and remember to take a break, stop and scrapbook something that inspires you

Using photo albums

One more post for today,

We have 3 daughter's whom we love equally, however buy the amount of photo's we have of them you would wonder....

I am sure I am not alone in this dilemma, daughter # 1 has tons of pictures, every event in her young life was documented well.

Daughter #2 has quite a few pictures, not as many as daughter #1 but still her stack of photo's is not to shabby.

Daughter #3 is outta luck, I do have pictures of her but no where near as many as the other girls and so many of the ones I do have are with her sister's in the picture.

I normally put 2 to 5 pictures on a layout, even more if I convert then to smaller sizes, I can't usually justify having one picture on a layout, heck I have tons of pictures it would take me forever to do that. However to help balance things out a bit I have been using one photo every so often, maybe the girls won't notice as much that the whole who has more scrapbook pages deal is lopsided.

So if you are like me and have multiple children or grandchildren give this little trick a try, do a few one photo layouts of the poor kid who was last in line in the photo ops department.

Photo storage

Have you finished sorting and storing all of your photo's yet? Just kidding I think it took me over a week to get mine done and every once and awhile I will run into a lonely picture in some odd place. With my photo album system in place I now have a home for anything I find.

Today's post is an example of how my photo albums work, when I started cleaning up my studio yesterday I ran into the cutiest cupcake paper ever, I have no idea when or where I got it but thankfully I still liked it! Rather than stick it back in the Cropper Hopper I grabbed one of my photo albums and began flipping through it to see how I could use the paper, it didn't take me long to find the perfect pictures of our oldest Daughters 1st Birthday. Heather will be 33 this September so it is high time I got this layout done!

Yepee, I have one less piece of pattern paper in my room and 2 more pages for Heathers scrapbook done. However I never did get around to cleaning up my room so I will give it another try today.

If you can find this book it is a must on organizing your photo's; "Photo Freedom" By Stacey Jillian, she has so may great tips and unique ways to store, scrapbook, and use up the mounds of photo's we all have. "Photo Freedom" was published by Simple Scrapbooks so it has become hard to find, keep searching because it is worth the time and money. She also offers a online class at Big Picture scrapbooking using her photo freedom method, I am not much of an on line student but I am sure it is great, Stacey is such a wonderful inspiration on scrapbooking and life in general.

Back to the cleaning, wish me luck!!

February, lets get more done

I have received so many e-mails the past month asking how I organize my scrapbooking supplies to get more done, so this month I will concentrate on organizing. First off keep in mind what works for one person may not be the best for another, we all think differently and scrapbook differently so take what I share that works for you and forget the rest!!

First and foremost you need to get your photo's organized, all the supplies and time in the world won't do you a bit of good if you are running around digging in drawers, bags and boxes of photo's. This can be a huge job but in the end you will be so happy you took the time to tackle this biggie

1.) Find a good out of the way place in your home that you have room to spread out and keep the mess out for a few days, you don't want to have to clean up at the end of each day.

2.) Gather up all the photo's in the house, check every drawer, closet, box and bag you can find, put them in your work area.

3.) Time to shop!! Yepee, you will need lots of cheapo regular pocket photo albums, I have a couple for each of our girls, some for family and trips we take. Also pick up a few cheap photo storage boxes with dividers. I bought my photo albums at a discount store on sale for 2/$5.00, the storage boxes were around $2.00 @. You will also need a photo safe pen to jot down dates etc on the back of the photo.

4.) Now comes the sorting, this is a huge job but don't get discouraged it is so worth the time you put into it. I sorted by each of our daughters then chronological when I could remember the dates. I sorted our events into different piles, Christmas, Easter, family trips, etc. Many of our daughters pictures were in magnetic albums I knew I need to get them out of that hostile environment so I worked on them first. If you are taking photo's out of these albums be very careful not to tear them and also don't stack them on top of each other, they may still have some sticky residue on them

5.) place the photo's you most want to work on in the albums, if you have more than one picture of an event go ahead and put them together in one sleeve, you can fit several in each sleeve. Use the storage boxes for events, Christmas tab, Easter tab etc.

6.) give yourself a prize after accomplishing each task, I give myself the time to do a layout from whatever has inspired me during this process, but maybe you need a little chocolate!! Reward yourself you are worth it

92 layouts ready to go

want to see what 92 layouts look like all stacked and done, just waiting for journaling

January wrap up

Wheeeee, the month is over have the final layout posted here of Tyler and his potty training from last spring.

Thanks to all of you for keeping me motivated to keep up the pace this month. I really struggled some days to get even one layout done.

Now for the total of the month.... Drum Roll please...... 92 LAYOUTS!!!!!!

Holy Hannah that is a lot! I had hoped to get 40 maybe even 50 done for the month but never expected to get this far, I will have lots of journaling to get done in the evenings for quite awhile so I can get them all in the correct scrapbooks. My girls have had a ball looking at the pages I finished each week at Sunday dinner, while they don't scrapbook themselves they do appreciate what I do for them.

Due to overwhelming requests I will be sharing a few tips on how I am able to get my scrapbooking done in record time. Will start the organizing posts today so stay tuned.