Keeping Up with the Stories

Since the death of my laptop a few months ago, I have not scrapbooked ONE.SINGLE.PAGE. {Gasp}

Now that might now seem like a big deal to some of you, but documenting my family’s stories is a big priority to me, and so falling several months behind has been stressful. So I made myself a goal this year to keep up with my 2012 photos and stories, but as good old Dave Ramsey says–if you don’t have a written plan, your goal will just be a dream. Knowing I wanted to be successful in accomplishing this goal, I was thinking about HOW I would go about keeping up with my 2012 photos when I remembered my sister-in-law, Shaela’s method of keeping up. It’s genius (especially her NOT GUILTY part that you’ll read more about in a minute!). Since this method works well for her, (and I’m thinking it will work for me) I asked her to come share because it might also work for YOU.

Hi everyone! My name is Shaela and I live in Las Vegas, NV. Pam asked me to do a guest post on my scrapbook method, so here I am!

I started scrapbooking traditionally about 10 years ago, and while I tried my best to keep up with pictures and layouts, as time went on (and marriage, kids, and life happened) I seemed to get more and more behind. But then I hit on a method that really worked for me, and I have successfully completed 2 years worth of scrapbooks: one from 2010 (traditional) and one from 2011 (digital).

Since I am both a traditional and a digital scrapbooker and have used this method successfully both ways, I hope that it will help many of you to accomplish every scrapbooker’s goal: to stay caught up with your layouts! 🙂 So I’m going to explain the method I have found that works best for me.

I decided early in 2010 that something needed to change. I wrote notes and took pictures and sometimes had them printed and put together in layouts, but most of the time my pictures just sat on my desk or in my computer and nothing was done with them. So the very first thing I did was take my 3 big boxes of photos (think Xerox paper boxes) from the last 8 years and label them “NOT GUILTY”. Seriously… I wrote that on the sides of them with a sharpie and stuck them in the back of my closet. I will get to them someday (hopefully), but even if I don’t, I’m NOT allowing myself to feel guilty. You cannot move forward if you are constantly looking back, and moving forward is what I wanted to do.

After I set my guilt aside, I downloaded and sorted the photos from my digital camera so I could start with a clean memory card. Then I set up a folder on my computer desktop labeled “2010 photos”. Inside that folder I set up a separate folder for each month of the year, like this:

Then at the end of each month, I took ALL of the photos on my camera and transferred them to that month’s folder. Most of the time I had random photos, but sometimes I had many photos from a specific event: birthdays, vacations, etc. I grouped those photos into folders within the month, like so:

The first week of the new month was my photo editing week. I went through my photos and fixed any flaws, deleted duplicates or bad shots and basically did general cleaning up. Once the photos were done, I burned a DVD disc with the photos from that month and slipped it into a cd case. I made 2 copies each month: a backup and a backup-backup (you can also backup your photos online if you like).

Since I was still scrapbooking traditionally in 2010, the next thing I did was plan out my layouts. I looked at the photos for the month and decided which stories I wanted to tell. For the special events I typically planned only one layout (either a single or 2-page spread) but the random photos were a bit more difficult to plan: sometimes one photo had a whole story to tell, and other times the photos were just snapshots of daily life. Once I had my layouts planned and sketched out, I cropped my photos and sent them to Costco for printing.

I would pick them up and place them with my sketchbook and work on the layouts throughout the month. This way I was scrapbooking July’s photos in August, August’s photos in September, etc. Since I gave myself a whole month to get them done, I found that it was very manageable, and the stories were still fairly fresh in my mind. If I ended up with a lot of random photos, I often scrapbooked an “ordinary days” layout where I put them all together and called it good.

Occasionally I had SO many photos from a day or event that I simply couldn’t scrapbook them all, but I still wanted to be able to see them. So I bought some 12×12 divided inserts and slipped the extra photos in after the initial layout of the event.
 Using this method I was able to fully complete my 2010 scrapbook by January 2011 – a feat I had NEVER accomplished! With my 2010 scrapbook completed, I was ready to follow the same method in 2011 but with a twist. While I love the physical craft of scrapbooking and getting my “hands dirty”, it was taking so much time (and money) that I found myself falling behind at times… having to scramble at the end of October or early November to finish up September’s layouts, for example. So in 2011 I decided to take the plunge into digital scrapbooking. I set up my folders on the computer the same way, but with a few additions. Within each month’s folder, I made 3 folders labeled “JPEG layout files, photos, and PSD layout files”, like this:

Within the photos folder I treated my photos the same as before: creating subfolders for special events and leaving the rest of the photos “loose.” Since my decision to switch to digital was based on saving on time and money, I also decided to use layered templates and Photoshop Elements to create my layouts, since this would save me a lot of time and planning in the long run. I also used quickpages occasionally.

I then basically followed the same routine: at the end of the month I put all my photos from my camera into the appropriate folder, cleaned and edited them, and then scrapbooked the prior month’s photos in the ensuing weeks. It went much smoother and faster doing it digitally because I didn’t have to crop, print, and physically cut each photo – I just dragged them into Photoshop when I was working on a layout. I saved all of my layouts as editable .psd files, and when I had a layout completed to my satisfaction I also saved it as a full-resolution .jpg in the JPEGs folder. When I finished a folder of photos, either within the month or for the whole month, I renamed the folder to add “- DONE” at the end of it so I knew what was finished and what still needed doing. At the end of the year, all my folders looked like this:

Many places offer scrapbook-size prints if you prefer to print your layouts and slip them into your own scrapbooks, but I chose to have mine bound into a photobook at the end of the year. The first week in January 2012 I uploaded all of my .jpg layouts from 2011 and had them bound into an 8×8 photobook from Shutterfly.

For the first time in 10 years I am “caught up” with scrapbooking. I don’t feel pressure and guilt anymore about the hundreds of photos that I still have in boxes from years ago. I know that even if I never get to those, my children and grandchildren will be able to look at what I have accomplished and what I’m doing now. It’s a method that has worked for me for 2 years now and a method I plan to continue in the years to come. I hope that it works for some of you as well!

(Pam again) Awesome, right? I’m going to do that NOT GUILTY thing immediately. lol

For lots more scrapbooking and crafty fun, visit Shaela on her blog!