Why I picked up scrapbooking again
Thursday, August 18th, 2011
It’s been 6 months since I quit all of my creative teams. Six months that I was ’scrap-free’ except for 1 or 2 pages I did. That didn’t happen because I was suddenly sick of scrapbooking. It happened because I had a lot of other stuff going on in my professional life. Stuff I was obsessing on. And people who know me will confirm: I’m the kind of girl that can’t have 2 obsessions at the same time!
About a month ago, my family and I brought a visit to the Zoo. It was our third visit in 5 years, and like the other times, I took plenty of photos. As I was looking at those pictures on my computer, a lot of pleasant memories came back of our last visit, 3 years ago. Some funny, memorable things happened back then, and I realized those memories where just collecting dust on my pc, I had never scrapped them or have them printed. In fact, those memories are not alone. My oldest is 7 years old and hasn’t got one complete album. Not even a regular photo album. All just digital files and a half finished paper scrapbook of her first year. My baby boy on the other hand is almost 2 and I have made a beautiful baby book for him. It’s entirely digitally scrapped and professionally printed and bound into a hardcover book. This is so not fair for my daughter!
So I scrapped. I scrapped pictures from our visit to another zoo 6 years ago. And it felt like coming home. It’s amazing how one particular hobby can still stick with me after 6 years and how I can still LOVE it. I never had that with any other hobbies!
The virus bit me again and I scrapped another page. And another one. All with photos from 3, 4, 5 or 6 years ago.
Then I visited the forums at The Sweet Shoppe and I decided to participate in the challenges again, this month’s portfolio really spoke to me. One of the challenges lead me to a post on the SSD blog, where Krista (one of the Sugar Babes) explained how she organizes her scrapping procedure. The way she organizes her stuff was pretty similar to mine, but one thing in particular struck me: the way she prepares her photos before she scraps them!!
She basicly browses her photos every month or so and decides which ones will end up in one of her layouts. She then puts the photos in separate tiff files, and already gives a name to that file like she would name her page (including the date). Those tiff’s are then saved in her ‘to scrap’ folder. That way she always has an overview of the pages she still needs to scrap and she can easily pick a set of photos that would go with a particular kit (or the other way around).
I really saw a light bulb after reading that post and I started doing the same thing. I just LOVE how easy it is now to start a new page! I got so excited on this better way of organizing that it didn’t stop there. I pushed that organization through to my scrapstuff and I started tagging my entire stash in ACDSee. It was a tedious job I spent days on, but it was SO worth it!!
Scrapping is such a blast right now and I scrap daily again. In a very organized way.
Here is that page that started it all again.










