Of Cats and Cardstock: Speeding Through a DC Scrapbooking Project

08 November 2018

Speeding Through a DC Scrapbooking Project

Hello, friends! It's been a bit since I posted. Still catching up on some projects for the store where I teach, but I have been able to sneak in a few hours of scrapbooking here and there! The key to making progress is this (shocking, I know...): You actually have to work on it! Those photos aren't going to scrapbook themselves!

So when we last talked about this, I was about to embark on a couple of Washington, D.C. projects. The first of those two projects is underway, so I thought I'd share a little bit about my process. This was my daughter's 7th grade social studies trip from 2005, and Spouse went along with her. I have a good number of photos, but not a crazy number, and not a lot of journaling other than photo captions. So I'm really trying to speed through this trip so I can move on to our family trip to D.C., which took place the following summer.

I started by gathering all of my materials. Even back then, you could tell that Bailey lived a "scrapbooking life" -- she knew to save memorabilia from school trips. She purchased postcards as souvenirs, knowing that they'd be nice additions to a scrapbook someday. It's really great to open up a folder and find all of this stuff ready to add to the album! I raised her well! LOL

Even better, she wrote on the backs of all of the photos as soon as we got them back from the developer! This has made things SO MUCH EASIER, as I can just use that information for my photo captions.

I used a trip itinerary to sort the photos into order by Day 1, Day 2, etc. Then I pulled out a few representative pictures and took them, along with some postcards, to Memory Bound where I teach. I picked out a few colors of coordinating cardstock and some pre-made die cut titles.

Next I settled in on a Friday night with my little buddy to start organizing the album. She was good company! (More on that later...)

This album will include lots of pocket pages, so I started by slipping the photos into the appropriately sized slots. Since these are smaller photos -- printed at 3.5x5 many moons ago -- I had to mat them all on 4x6 cardstock. Still, that's a pretty easy proposition...and relatively mindless work!

I used a variety of sizes and configurations of pocket pages throughout the album. As I adhered the photos to the 4x6 cardstock, I wrote the captions onto sticky notes so I could type them up later.

If, for instance, I had a few leftover vertical photos that didn't fit in my horizontal slots, I reserved them for traditional pages. I just shoved everything for those pages down into a 12x12 sheet protector to work on later.

I continued along like this until all the photos had a "home" in the album. All of this was accomplished in one long evening while watching TV with my furry friend.

The next time I worked on the album, I moved back into my crafting area where I could actually start putting it together. That meant adding color to some pages, typing up the journaling, and finishing up the traditional pages.

While I was working on the pages, I remembered that Spouse and Bailey had EACH received one of those ginormous group photos after the trip. I found both of them in the back of the guest room closet...go figure! Then I got really crazy and decided that if I could make it work, I would actually put one giant photo in the album and recycle the other one. I first made sure that cutting it in half would not interfere with the image of either Spouse or Bailey, then I got really brave and just did it. Seriously...why not? The photo is not doing anyone any good hidden away in the back of the closet! Now I'm really happy that it's in the album!

As I went through the folder of memorabilia, I found a couple of small bags filled with postcards. The bags were nice so I decided to use them as pockets for brochures and itineraries. Are they acid-free? Probably not, but they're not holding photos so I'm willing to risk slight deterioration. The clear bag at the left holds the trip itinerary...