Inspiration Binders

I wonder who invented the binder? That person was very wise, indeed. A binder enables you to store all kinds of related, or even unrelated, information together, yet keep it organized with tabs. And now that binders come in all kinds of cool designs, you can not only be organized, but look good, too.

This year, I've been on a quest for ORDER in my life. So yesterday, when I really should have been doing one of about 30 other things on my to-do list, I decided that I would purge my vast collection of old scrapbooking magazines and put ideas worth keeping in my binder. Well, one look at my old, plain green "Inspiration Binder" left me completely uninspired, so of course, I had to completely revamp it. I decided to use these two cool binders I bought last fall at back-to-school time (did I mention that I love to buy school supplies, even though I'm WAY out of school?).

I began by pulling out Creating Keepsakes magazines from 2002. Now let me ask you: Have you looked recently at some of those magazines from "way back then"? I mean, really looked? It is amazing how much has changed in the scrapbooking world. First, our collective hair was bigger back then. There must have been only ten colors of cardstock available. There was no ribbon...only fuzzy fibers...and not a Prima flower in sight! But there were all kinds of paper dolls doing all sorts of jobs. Although I never did it, poor scrapbookers actually had to cut out alphabets with Exacto knives! And what the heck was up with all of that mica and cork?

Suffice it to say, I didn't find many things to keep from those days, save for an occasional article or layout idea. Now that I've been scrapbooking for so many years, I have a clear idea of what I like and don't like, which made the purging process go rather quickly. In a couple hours time, I freed up two magazine files on my shelf, giving me much needed room for some newer idea books and albums. I still need to go through 2004 and 2005 magazines but plan to keep 2006 and 2007 for now.

I now have two Inspiration Binders: one for articles and another for layout and sketch ideas. I set up tabs in the "articles" binder for information on journaling, design, techniques, etc. The "sketch and layout" binder has tabs for layout ideas (one-photo, two-photo, etc.), card designs, mini-albums, and paper crafting projects. I simply cut out the ideas I liked, taped them onto graph paper, and stuck them into the binder under the appropriate tab.

Next stop: Ten years of Bon Appetit magazines. Dinnertime could be looking up.