I love scrapbook magazines. Every time one arrives in my mailbox, I pore over its pages, mesmerized by the colors, the paper, the designs, and oh- be still my beating heart- the new products! But then reality kicks in and I sink down from Cloud Nine (the feeling, not the company), and then comes the overwhelming feelings of inadequacy. You see, as much as I LOVE the pages and all, I can’t produce work like that. I can’t afford to spend 12 hours on a page meticulously cutting out flower petals in my background paper, adding layer upon layer of paper and digitally enhancing every photo. And I can’t afford to use an entire sheet of rub-ons in layers to create a custom background. Like most of us these days I’m too busy and too broke.
But does that mean I can’t make beautiful, one of a kind scrapbooks, preserving my memories for my children and my children’s children? No. I can. But I just have to go about it in a different way. But I need to keep my scrapbook pages in balance with my lifestyle. So I’m taking a deep breath and refusing to get overwhelmed and doing things my way, with my own amazing results. Here’s my first tip to help you keep from getting overwhelmed by the overachiever scrapbookers spotlighted in magazines:
1. Organize your pictures ahead of time so you’re ready to scrap whenever life gives you a few free moments. Take a stack of photos and a cheap acid-free 4X6 photo album and sort through the pics while watching your favorite tv show, waiting for water to boil, or riding in the car with someone. I sort by category (my son, my daughter, Christmas, etc.), and then chronologically within these categories, keeping like-pictures together. I also keep an eye out for similar pictures that are not related chronologically (child sleeping, child eating food, messy child, making funny faces, etc.) and put these into piles so I can scrap them together. Then I stick a few pictures (as many as I think will fit on one scrapbook page) in each sleeve of the album, keeping them in order as I go. That way when it comes time to scrap them, I can just grab the photo album and take pics out of a sleeve at a time. If you use post-bound or other albums with plastic sleeves, you can also just pop the pictures in the sleeve until you scrap your pages. I like to go ahead and choose papers and supplies that go along with the pictures and put these in the sleeves also, then all I need is a trimmer and adhesive and some time to get it done! Less time wasted on getting organized means more time you can spend on getting creative!
