hopefully something rhetorical

So, as I have mentioned before, I am a closet scrapbooker.  I have a ton of beautiful supplies, and I work really hard to keep them organized.  I have a ton of magazine layouts for inspiration that I repeatedly come back to.  I have lots of ideas for pages, and I have even sold a few layouts on Ebay.  In fact, when I am creating layouts in absence of my pictures and stories I do just fine. My secret is that I have NEVER made an album (or a layout for that matter) for us to keep. I think I get caught up into the mindset that what I create to capture my family’s memories has to be perfect.  Somehow, it is my job to capture them perfectly.

As I said in my last post, this week I am doing the week in the life of challenge with Ali Edwards.  It has been really fun to capture a look at my week.  I have been taking lots of fun pictures, and I am excited to see the album come together.  For a while, I have been thinking about how all this was going to come together.  What kind of album could I do?  What all would I include from my week? I also have thought a lot about how I was going to use items that I already have in my stash.  I don’t want to buy a bunch of new stuff.

One thing I have had in my stash for a while is a small three album set with a case that I got on sale once.  I think they are basic grey.  In fact, I am pretty sure that I have two of these album sets.  As I was considering my project this week, I realized that one of those small albums would be perfect, but I wasn’t completely sure what to do with the sets or whether or not I want to break up the set into different albums that weren’t themed together.  I really wanted to figure out how these three could work together to capture this year for our family. One of the other problems I have is also trying to decide how to work with the HUGE backlog of pictures I have to get into albums somehow.

Then, it hit me in a flash exactly how to set everything up.  Because I already have them, the three albums I have will work together, but in the future this will probably be done in one album, but broken up into pieces using dividers or something unique to split up the sections.

What I am going to do is take each of the albums and use each one to document a part of my year.  The first book will be a moment.  Every year we all likely have one moment that we document more carefully.  This could be a trip or family vacation.  Or, it could be a child’s birthday party.  Anything that you have enough pictures to tell a larger story about.  For us, this year, our moment will be our trip to Europe.

The next album will be my week in the life album.  This is something that I would like to do once a year to consider how my life changes over the years. And, finally the last album will be my year in review album.  I can organize this by months or just have the layouts of the rest of the stuff that happens.  Holidays, etc.  The key I have to remember is that it doesn’t have to be oppressive to get all those done.

What I am hoping this organizational system will do for me is ease the burden of having to create full albums of every moment of our lives.  It is not feasible for me to do that, and I think it is what has been holding me back all this time.  This will also give me a great way to get started on pulling together the past years.  While I won’t have a week in the life for the past years, I am going to try to create one section for a moment for that year and one section for the year in review.  I don’t know how big my albums will need to be, but I do really like the idea of using the three-ring albums.  They are easier to add pieces to.  And, I like the idea of doing one album for each year.

I think my first step is to go back and pull together pictures from each year and see what the moment would be and what the review information would be.  I think that if I start to weed out some of the huge back log of pictures that I can create a reasonable number of albums to put together, and then, maybe it won’t see so daunting a task.  I will let you all know how it goes and share what I come up with here!