Scrapbooks Under Construction!

This is a page from 2003 from a scrapbooking convention our store hosted. I only recently scrapbooked this big event! The title "Scrapbooks Under Construction" seems fitting for this post!

I talk with people all the time who are behind on their scrapbooking, and I can certainly relate to that! After considerable messing around with things, I FINALLY finished the 2004 scrapbooks...14 years later!

You might be wondering why I was in this predicament to begin with. Way back then, in 2004 or thereabouts, I did quite a bit of scrapbooking but started skipping over events or activities that I didn't want to scrapbook, such as holidays. All holidays. And vacations. All vacations. And cat pictures. All cat pictures. And anything with a picture of ME. With so much skipping, I had oodles of pictures still not scrapbooked.

Add to that the problem of the old post-bound album format, which made it hard to go back and add photos...and that's why I am in this situation today: Partially finished albums.

Thank goodness for 3-ring binders! I converted all of my post-bound albums to this format, which makes life ever so much easier. And thank goodness for pocket pages, with which I easily added the missing events into my 2004 albums. I forced myself to deal with the Christmas photos and they really weren't as overwhelming as I expected. I kept telling myself that as soon as Christmas was done, the album would be finished!

I just kept the format very simple and added a few captions here and there. With that, I've finished two albums for 2004.

 However, we did go to DisneyWorld that summer, so I have an entire vacation still to do. I've purchased the album and paper for that and plan to start that project in short order.

 So I thought I'd take a cautious one-eyed peek to see how daunting 2005 might be. When I lifted the lid on the photo box, I could see that it was stuffed FULL, so that was a bit concerning! 

 But when I pulled out my albums, I could see that I've already made two albums for that year and they're also very full, which suggested that I just MIGHT be in better shape than it appeared! I started looking through the pictures in the box and comparing them to layouts already done and discovered...HIP HIP HOORAY!...that with just a few exceptions, almost all of the events have already been scrapbooked! The photos in the box are duplicates which I promptly and GLEEFULLY recycled!

Now I did discover TWO big trips in that box which will also need to be scrapbooked, but I will do those separately as they will need to go in a different album.

 Then I turrned to my memorabilia files....YIKES! This is where I will need to focus my attention for 2005. In these files are newspaper clippings, programs, tickets, etc. which need to be incorporated into the two albums. I had skipped over them previously because I was using the old post-bound format. So now I will use smaller sleeves and just add them in between the pages that are already done in my 3-ring binders. This will be easy to do and shouldn't take a lot of time. Some of this stuff is vacation memorabilia, so it's actually not quite as bad as it looks.

 

 So even though I still have a ton to do, I am slightly encouraged to find that 2005 won't be nearly as hard to scrpabook as the previous years I've worked on. I'm going to keep going and see how far I can get this weekend!

jp