Do you have a rhyme or reason behind your albums?

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webseitler

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I'm just curious. I've been trying to come up with an answer for this myself... for YEARS. One day I'll get there. LOL! I love the beauty of scrapbooking but I am also a very practical person. My creative side wants to just play and make things... but I forget to get organized about it and then I end up feeling like I just wasted my time playing around and not really scrapping. UGH!

So, tell me: What's your overarching "goal" when you make pages? To capture photographs? To tell little stories? To record big events? How to you approach your pages? What keeps you going?

This is one reason why I latched on to Project Life this year... it had "definitions." It's like Project 365 with notes like a diary--I can do that! :D

But every time I have tried to create a whole album I have failed... my DD is now 9 and her baby book is STILL unfinished. Our family albums are a mess with random layouts from the last 10 years--half paper, half digital. It makes me want to cry when I think about it...

I think my biggest problem is just that I see so many pages I admire and I try to lift them because they are beautiful... but I don't have any sort of structure in place to keep me in line and motivated, so I remain a scrapping failure. I'M SO SICK OF IT! I love this hobby. I really need help to figure this out so that I can fully enjoy it, too. Sigh.

So-amble on and help a girl out! :thumbup: Tell me your thoughts about what you do and why you do it.
 
Um Nicole.......there is ALWAYS rhyme and reason for this OCD girl. LOL

In my albums, I do one for each year. In order.

As for what is on those pages......I scrap all events....big and small. ALL of my journaling is notes to my kid that I am scrapping. SO basically they will have years and years of love notes and funny stories from their mom. I tell the good, bad and the ugly. I want them to know how I felt when they scrapped their knee or made their first goal in soccer or earned that badge in boy scouts. Some pages have lots of journaling and some don't. It just depends on what I want to tell them.

So I guess my main goal in my scrapbooking is my journaling. I want them to know how special each and every moment is with them. Now, having an awesome kit, pictures and/or template is just icing on the cake. :thumbup:
 
I scrap to record our life. I've only done a couple of special albums - 1 Disney and 1 vacation and 1 Washington DC album - but for the most part, I do those yearly albums of the family to get our memories - all of them. Like Tara - I'm a journaler (yet have never kept a diary). I'm not a terribly artsy person so I'm okay with a pragmatic approach to stuff

Though - Heather pretty much has me convinced to look at next year with a Project Life Eye with some special layouts thrown in. 1 layout per week..and a few extras sounds great :D
 
I scrap chronologically. I started in 2010 which is the year we got married. All year long, I scrap events as they happen. For example, I already have 4th of July finished. Every once in a while, a holiday or something passes without me getting a page done soon after, but I put it on a list to finish sometime and usually get to it eventually- when it happens to fit into a portfolio point. I get really excited at the end of the year when it's time to print my photo book and that motivates me to finish the last few pages.

I've also done a 365/project life for the last three years, so I pretty much capture something about our life every single day. I put all my pages into one book. For example, you will have week 26, week 27, 4th of july, week 28 etc. I'm super OCD and my opposite pages even match. It's a little silly.

I also do photo books for major trips. Right now I'm finishing up an album from the cruise we took in March. Shorter trips usually just get stuck in the main photo book.

This is all probably much easier for me since we don't have kids, but I'm also very organized about the entire thing.
 
I do two sets of albums: photo books and scrapbooks.

I do a big photo book for each duty station for us, and it's just photos plus words, and the occasional layout as needed to explain. So my Italy book spans all events from October 5, 2006 when we left for Italy to October 7, 2009 when we arrived in Georgia. My Georgia book covers from the day we got here to the day we leave for texas. I print these as coffee table books.

Our scrapbooks are done in Library of Memories style- All About Jen/Jer(one album, two sections), Our Family(us plus my stepkids, and any kids we eventually have), The People We Love(layouts that are about our family and friends rather than us), The Places We Go(trips, about the areas we live, etc). Plus Project Life, of course.

I do mini albums a lot too- I have one for our wedding, December Daily, House tours in each location we have lived, etc.

Other than mini albums and photobooks, none of my albums are complete. I try to keep a running list of layouts I want to complete and see what I can scrap to fill in those holes when I have time. All of my albums are in binders, so I can rearrange and add pages as needed.

When it comes to children, I don't intend to do yearly albums for them. I'll add to the LOM for them- an All About Me section, and they'll get a very simple first year album with 2-4 layouts for each month that will actually be a photobook, most likely.
 
I do annual albums and I primarily use photos taken during that year with a few exceptions. Pages are organized chronologically and capture general pages and pages that memorialize special occasions. I'm not much of a story teller, so I don't tend to have much journaling unless you count the occasional quote or poem.
 
My photobooks are by year and in order of event. I scrap a bunch of pages just for me or to one-off print for special occasions, for others, etc, too, and there is no rhyme or reason to those :)
 
I use the Library of Memories system like Jen. In addition to my library albums, I have a wedding album, school and Scout albums for my boys and a set of albums for my military career.

ETA: I really like having my albums arranged by topic rather than chronologically. It seems more natural to look through them that way. I also started Project Life this year and that satisfies whatever need I felt for chronological recordkeeping. I think the two "systems" complement each other nicely.
 
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taracotta7 said:
Um Nicole.......there is ALWAYS rhyme and reason for this OCD girl. LOL

In my albums, I do one for each year. In order.

As for what is on those pages......I scrap all events....big and small. ALL of my journaling is notes to my kid that I am scrapping. SO basically they will have years and years of love notes and funny stories from their mom. I tell the good, bad and the ugly. I want them to know how I felt when they scrapped their knee or made their first goal in soccer or earned that badge in boy scouts. Some pages have lots of journaling and some don't. It just depends on what I want to tell them.

So I guess my main goal in my scrapbooking is my journaling. I want them to know how special each and every moment is with them. Now, having an awesome kit, pictures and/or template is just icing on the cake. :thumbup:
Click to expand...

This is almost me to a T - I don't do my years in order but I do finish a year before moving onto the next. Once in a while I scrap current photos because I love them and want to get them scrapped, but for the most part I pick a year and stick with it.

I also scrap everything - events, every day things, etc. and the stories are what are important to me. Like Tara, they are messages to the people who are in the photos (and when I'm 90 I'll be able to remember who and what everything is!).
 
My goal is to tell my and my loved ones' stories. Not only because I am, by nature, a storyteller, but because so much of the story previous to me or previous to my memories is missing/not told. My daddy and his mom died before I could get back in touch with them, and while I have traced their (our) genealogy back many generations, it is not the same at all. The older I get, the more I believe that I am a carbon copy of my daddy, but I have no 'proof,' no stories to back that up. In the same way, there are so many questions I have abt my childhood that I can't remember the answers to and my mom refuses to discuss. My mom loves stories except the ones she's involved in. She (and my dad and my sister) don't tell stories that make them uncomfortable or showcase our less-than-desirable sides. So frustrating.

My scrapbook pages are all the stories I want my daughter to know: the good ones, the bad ones, the sad ones, the amazing ones, the little things I won't remember the older I get, the big things I won't want to remember the wiser I get. I want her to have a complete exhaustive chronicle of her life, especially the years she cannot remember, so that she can then judge for herself what kind of person she is, what kind of family we are, etc.

I don't scrap chronologically, but I have them organized that way, and when I win the lottery and make albums of the last 5 years, they will be in chronological order. That makes the most sense (and seems like the easiest!) to me. My CTs keep me constantly scrapping, and since I try very hard to only make pages for my CTs that I can/will use in my personal albums, it all shakes out. Going back to work has slowed me down a little, but prolly for the best seeing as I was mostly 'caught up' with 85-90% of each year's events/stories scrapped until this year.

I have a 'To Scrap' folder with the photos I still want to scrap, and sometimes I go through that folder and weed it down, too. Do I really have to scrap every adorable pic of my DD? No. Do I really have to scrap every time we go to to the zoo/pool/park/etc.? No. As much as I want to completely cover our lives, I don't want to suffocate in the coverage, kwim? It's a fine line that is redefined regularly.

HTH, Nicole! I could ramble for days as you well know... :)

ETA: I was never really a fan of mini-albums until I started (AND COMPLETED -- gasp!) December Daily this past year. I am so over-the-top into Christmas, and I absolutely adore having one little book that encompasses that rather large thing and gets to be special and separate just like how it feels in my life when it gets to be that time of year.
 
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I have several albums that all have a specific goal. It costs money to print a page and albums take up space in my house! So, when I scrap I always scrap something that will go in my albums. Each month, I make a list of the pages I would like to scrap from my pictures and life experiences. Then when I sit to scrap, I look at that list. When I do challenges too, I also make it work from this list. If I have a page that I admire, I make it fit with my topic that will go in my albums. Mostly I tell stories. Sometimes I capture feelings, and personality traits. I want it to be beautiful to look at and jog a memory, so when we look through the albums it will spark a story, a moment in time. This year, I've actually focused more on journalling and writing the story down than I have in years past. It's fun writing!

Here are my albums:

1. My son - chronological by year. Events, activities of his life.
2. HIstorical me - story of my life from childhood continuing up to now
3. Historical spouse - story of his life from childhood continuing up to now
4. HIstorical pages of my son's Grandparents - stories from their lives continuing up until now (I just got some great pictures of my Dad playing ping-pong that I'm excited to put in his book! I don't get that many pictures of my Dad!)
5. US - events of my DH & I together since we were married!
6. Journal - this is my personal reflection book. Spiritual thoughts, reflections, musings about topics.
 
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Like Jen and Kate I work primarily with the Library of Memories system...I also have our wedding/honeymoon/anniversay trips album (we take a special trip each year for our anniversary). I'm hoping to add Project Life to the mix next year.
I am not now nor have I ever been a chronological scrapper so this works well for. I love being able to scrap what I want, when I want and not being tied down to a timeline.
 
I think my overarching goal is to record any memories of my kids so that later they'll be able to look back on that. But I still find myself kind of unorganized. Because I had my first child in 2001 and didn't start scrapping until 2011, I have a huge backlog of pics and events of all 5 of my kiddos. It is overwhelming sometimes, because I know I'll never get them all done, yk?
 
Wow, you are all so much more organized than I am!

I scrap memories. For example, today we went to the peach orchard and picked fruits and veggies. I took lots of photos and will scrap those.

I also scrap quotes and emotions and motivational thoughts.

And I like doing hybrid projects too.

For me, sometimes it is more the process than the product, though I really WANT a product when I scrap.
 
I probably won't help at all because I scrap for me. I really dislike scrapping events. I can't even remember the last birthday party I did or Christmas because it's always the same thing. I would rather capture an interview with the birthday boy or a special memory, so my albums aren't organized at all. I do try to date most of mine and one day I can put them in chronological order. But for now this is MY hobby - I scrap what I want when I want. I also scraplift at the end of the month and will mix those with my other layouts. For someone who can be OCD I'm surprisingly laid back about scrapping. I don't sweat the "small stuff" like scrapping ALL my pictures or scrapping them in order, I just have fun and enjoy myself.
 
They are love letters to my family.

I have a nephew that asks me to take him on the same adventures every summer. It is hilarious but it is so fun to look back at a photo of the same place when he was in the stroller to now. Don't worry. Every year I also add some new adventure for a surprise.

I make my nieces and nephews a book every year. For the most part this is one of the "hits" of their presents every year. They love having them. I just gave all of them their books this year and even the two year old was thrilled with her book. (They don't live nearby and I've only seen her about four visits in her life).

And this is sort of a selfish reason, I suppose, but since I still don't have children it gives me a purpose to be able to work on so many children's scrapbooks (nieces and nephews and "honorary" nieces and nephews) and I guess in some way I feel like I'm leaving something that might have mattered.

It is also a great way to remember the stories that would have been forgotten over the years.

I print most of mine as photobooks now. Some are scrapped pages and some are using the photobook software. That is the easiest for me because I make multiple copies for the child, me, my parents. etc. Going digital makes it so much easier! If you can believe this, when I was a paper scrapper I used to make multiple pages of the same design by hand to go in everyone's books. Yikes! For the little one this year I got a Take Your Pix board book album that you slip 4x6 photos into. I scrapped the 4x6s with a background, matting around photos, minimal journaling and sometimes an embellishment.

I wish you could get a copy of The Big Picture by Stacy Julian to read. That book changed my life. I always thought I was behind in scrapbooking when I was trying to do it chronologically. After reading that book I realized that every story I got scrapped was enough. In fact I think my scrapbooking got better because I wanted to get more of the stories down. Stacy is very encouraging.
 
My goal when I scrapbook is to capture my memories of our life, mostly through pairing journaling and photos. Every page does one of these things:

-tell a particular story
-quote something that one of the kids said (with context)
-capture something about that moment in time, like DS's personality traits at age 8 or what a typical trip to the playground is like
ecord an event (I stink at getting these done, LOL)
-showcase a favorite photo (sometimes these get paired with one of the above, sometimes I let them stand on their own, like when I scrap our yearly photo of 3 generations of the family together)

I print my pages individually so that I can put them into yearly albums. That way even if my 2008 album isn't fully finished 4 years later, there's still enough there to look back and remember what each of the kids was like then and what our family life was like. Eventually I'll get it all scrapped, or maybe I won't. I make sure to scrap the few most memorable things as soon as I can, and if I never get to some of the lesser memories it's okay. While I'm working on the albums I just add pages as I finish them (not chronologically). When I finally declare that year finished, which may be 5 years later, I reorganize the pages into chronological order.

I don't do many mini albums, just our yearly family album. I used to have a separate album for each child, but I was printing too many layouts multiple times. I love the simplicity of having 1 album per year!
 
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My OCD tendencies make me too high-strung, so I have decided to scrap what I want to scrap when I want to scrap it. I was never printing, though, because my albums would be too random. So I finally decided to print single pages through Persnickety, and put them together with sheet protectors. Then, next time I print I can place my pages in there, and I've given myself permission to leave a side blank so that I won't have a reason to put off getting them in an album. The perfectionist in me often prevents me from doing things that I can't make perfect, so I have to figure out something that will work for me.

I just took Kayla's finding your photo flow class, and something I love is adding a caption with my thoughts on the picture, so that the story isn't lost. Blogging can get slow, I may not e inspired to scrap, but if I add in a caption to te photos like I were tellin someone about it, I really love it. Then when I am ready to scrap the story is already there from a fresh point of view.

I'm all about scrapping the little things, too. Big vacations, ex that most people make albums of intimidate me. Right now my scrapping time is me time, so I don't like to add in too much pressure.
 
For me, scrapbooking is my super power of being able to stop time... ;)

So, I primarly want to scrap those tidbits that will get lost after a few months and I won't remember silly things kiddo has said.

My goal yearly is to get at least my P365 albums done... I have all the photos (and they trigger stories for me)... but I'm so behind - still working on 2010 and 2011... then all the other layouts are just icing on the cake for that year... however, I am happy to report that I have managed to get Dec Daily done each year - might take me to summer, but that is done... still working on Week in the LIfe.

But in all honest - my albums are yearly and my layouts are dictated by CT requirements. I need to find out a way to scrap my other things... I have vacations I want to have in the album... and I'm really bad at scrapping big events like birthdays, holidays, and family events... :(
 
I document each of my boys' lives and have multiple albums for each of them. That, of course, includes the other people in their lives.

I was a paper scrapper for years and have thousands of paper layouts. Since I never scrapped chronologically, my digi layouts are now mixed in with my paper layouts. My style didn't change much when I went from paper to digi, so it looks fine.

I'm not big on lovey-dovey layouts, it's just not "me" and my family would think it odd if I did many of those. My boys still know I love and care about them. ;) I photograph the times that are important to them, so that's what I scrap. I think about what I would have liked to know about my childhood and what I want my descendents to know about our family. That guides me. My boys have always played a lot of sports, so I do a lot of sports layouts. I envision their children looking at their dads playing their sports and getting a big kick out of it. :thumbup:
 
I do a little bit of everything....I like to always have some kind of project going and then I scrap everything else in between.So I have P365 going and a cruise album for Sam. Everything else is just random. I just recently started a folder for each of the kids where I put a copy of the lo's I want to put in individual albums for them. They key for me is ALL of my LO'S are labeled by the date the picture/s where taken (7-25-12AbbyBirthday)....this way even when I don't scrap chronologically my lo's still end up saved chronologically :)
 
Ok, I'm realizing my response sounded kind of stupid because the kids' books end up being sort of chronological because I give them one every year. Sometimes I make them theme oriented. For example, for the littlest one I did our trip to the amusement park where I had the most pictures of her. I'm working on an ABC scrapbook for her but that is taking me a while. Two of the older ones stay with me every summer and we have "Camp" so this year I gave them a themed Camp Scrapbook.

This means that none of the kids have the Christmas visit from last year. Since they only see each other about two or three times a year (if we are lucky) I will probably make a book of those visits and include a few years of those times we get together or just Christmas celebrations.

I also work on a lot of "themed" albums for myself. My problem is that I like the size of the photobooks but sometimes I have difficulty deciding when I'm done enough to print if I don't have a specific theme. On the flip side, by printing the photobooks my pages are actually out there to be enjoyed instead of sitting on my hard drive. And that is what I remind myself when I'm looking at them. Sometimes, if I have a coupon to Shutterfly expiring I will print a series of layouts that may not belong in a particular theme album and just title the album Memories from 2008-2010.

Don't know if this helps at all or is more confusing.
 
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