Boy, if you're following along with my scrapbooking CATCH-UP journey, it must be about as riveting as watching paint dry. Surely no one has plodded along quite this slowly.
Still, I'm happy that I'm at least moving in the right direction -- as opposed to not moving AT ALL, as was the case for many years.
Over the years, I've learned that I'm very much a PROCESS person. I'm always interested in the process, or steps, someone employs to reach a particular goal. That's why I like to occasionally share my scrapbooking process, with the possibility that it might help someone else on a similar journey.
Each time I start working on a new year of scrapbooking, I look at three different areas:
1) PAGES already made, if any
2) PHOTOS to be printed
3) MEMORABILIA to be included
--- PAGES ---
First, I took a look for any pages I've already made which might be stuck in a pile somewhere. Sure enough, I found four. And four pages are better than none! So into a brand new album they went. I recently purchased three additional binders at Memory Bound using some birthday and Christmas money so I should be in good shape for awhile.
For both of these pages, I have corresponding memorabilia (a concert program and a newspaper article) to add to the album.
--- PHOTOS ---
Next, what shape are the photos in? A quick look at my digital photo files told me that my 2013 photos were in a real mess. In May of that year, my dad passed away following a brain biopsy and a couple of weeks in hospice. While I sat with him in the final days, I felt like my life was in free-fall.
From that point through the remainder of the year, many things fell by the wayside. I spent almost all of the summer sorting through a lifetime of my parents' belongings as I prepared for an auction that fall. It's still really hard for me to look at the photos I took of that process, and I'm not planning to scrapbook them as part of the chronological family albums I'm working on right now. (They'll eventually go into my own family history albums, so I'll print them when I'm ready to tackle that project.)
Still, in order to parse out the photos I DO want to include in my current scrapbooks, I had to sift through them all. This was not an easy process and took multiple attempts to work through them all.
But it wasn't all miserable. I ran across a number of fun pictures while moving files around. These were images I'd completely missed because they had been mislabeled.
There were several "cat shaming" photos... (The actual photos are much better than these screenshots!)
There were all the photos (mostly outtakes!) from my Downtown Tabby photo shoot. :) Sweet Tinsel was such a good sport.
There was even a picture of me in a class with a customer! There are almost no pictures of me teaching so I was happy to find this one. (This is a screenshot but my hair still looks quite big in the actual photo!)
Finally, I got through a good chunk of the year. I printed off a few "lower priority" photos (such as my garden or flower pictures) as collages. This is a good way to fit a lot of pictures in an album without taking up any space at all. Highlights in the album are good enough for me, as I can always refer back to the digital photos. At some point, it would be fun to make a garden album but that will have to wait!
Finally, I made a list of the photos I needed to print, and uploaded 10 months' to Walgreens for printing. That just leaves the holiday season to sort through. Compared to other years, there aren't a ton of photos to scrapbook for 2013 which is probably a really good thing.
--- MEMORABILIA ---
Finally, I dug out the folders of memorabilia I had stashed away from that year. I slipped many items into sleeves and put them into the album. As I finish the pages, I'll just intersperse them all together in the right order.
Now that I have a better handle on the photo situation, I should be able to finish up this year of scrapbooking fairly quickly.
At least that's my plan! Fingers and toes crossed!
jp
jp
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