Looking at these albums makes me happy. Color coded and organized = Happy Maegan.
I finished up the spine labels on my Library of Memories last night. Here is a closer look at the spines of the albums (click to view larger.) I am so pleased with the way they turned out, and now I am completely obsessed with circle labels.
I cannot tell you how good it feels to have this done. I am still waiting for some albums to arrive, but other than that they are ready for my family to enjoy.
I made a big decision last weekend regarding this library. Originally I was just going to include my digital layouts (about three years worth, not bad) but then I realized how much of our story that as leaving out. Zoë has almost two full albums. Kelly and I have less than a handful of layouts about us. They are all in the old school Creative Memories albums. I've been doing this for almost ten years now so you can imagine my horror when I looked through the old albums. Dude. There are no words, besides maybe, "Shield your eyes!" At least I can laugh at myself, right? I was SO proud of those layouts when I first created them. I will scan one of those beauties and post it this week.
Now brace yourself before you read this next section. After looking through the old paper albums I did three things that I am sure could get me shunned in some circles.
1. It became apparent to me looking through my layouts that when I first started scrapbooking I felt the need to scrap every photo I took. I had quite a few layouts that said absolutely nothing. There were pictures of people and a date. No story, nothing. (And they were ugly). Quite a few of them were my baby pictures. Take birthday's for example. I do not need a 12x12 layout of each birthday (that I hardly remember). Instead I pulled one photo from each birthday and will make ONE layout documenting the event.
2. I pulled out a small pile of layouts to recreate digitally. Yeah, they are that bad. The story and pictures are good...the layout is not. I know what you are thinking, "You have a thousand pictures to be scrapped and you are re-doing pages that are done?" Yep. They are that bad.
3. I sliced and diced all of my Creative Memories layouts/albums. For those of you who aren't familiar with the lovely CM strap hinge pages let me fill you in. They are *almost* 12x12 and have thick sides. One side fits into the album hinges, the other is to make for sturdy page flipping. They were the product to have when I started doing this in 1998. Now, I hate them. The 12x12 paper never fit right, you had to trim the sides. And the pages are a bear to rearrange. Oh, and when we first started out, most scrappers didn't put cardstock or patterned paper on the page insert, we scrapped right on those bad boys. Then embellished with lots of stickers. Nice. There is no way I was going to re-do all those pages. Instead I cut the reinforced side off (the side with the staple that went into the strap hinge) and slipped the entire thing into a 12x12 page protector. Super easy. It was so satisfying to spend an hour or so slicing and dicing and then placing the layouts into a nice new album. And now all of my layouts will be included in our library.
I have spent the last week organizing our house. I'm not sure if the nesting has started or it is my normal spring cleaning OCD. Probably a combination of both. I have been looking for months for a bookcase to display my new scrapbook library and I finally found one. It was quite a challenge to find a piece of furniture that would a) be deep enough to hold the albums and b) be wide enough to fit the crazy recessed area in our dining room. To prepare for the bookcase I sold our armoire on Craig's list. It was nice but it really had just turned into a crap collector for us. The drawers were all full of DVDs that we never watched and the cabinet was full of odds and ends that had no other home. After a week, almost everything has a new home. Including our DVD's. I condensed four drawers of DVDs into these cute storage binders. That is sooo much better. (See, I told you I was obsessed with circle labels.) And they will look fabulous in our new bookcase below the scrapbooks. There is a method to my madness...
I will be back with more organizational goodness next week. Good times. I say that in all seriousness. Poor Kelly must think I've cracked up. LOL!
