just what I need, a new project

Today was glorious. Slow-paced, sleeping in (until 8:15!), without much of a plan for the day.

So I got started on a project I’ve been meaning to get to for months now: my photos and scrapbooks. Ever since I quit my job in July, I’ve been meaning to get back into it, but there have always been other things- clients, morning sickness, cleaning, meetings, television, sleeping- to keep me busy and away from it. But Jessica inspired me with all of her talk lately about getting her photos organized nicely into simple albums. So today I dove in.

I pretty much have the last 5 years of our lives to catalog. Yeah. And I take a lot of pictures, people. I stopped my scrapbooks at college graduation, so nothing since then has been put into albums. Thankfully though, I had a lot of them already semi-organized into envelopes labeled ‘Such-and-Such’s Wedding, June 2001′ or ‘Camping 2002′, things like that. But, I only have prints from my digital camera up to the end of 2003 or so. So I spent most of the afternoon comparing my prints to what I have on my computer (which, thanks to my anal-retentive nature, I already had organized into years and months and labeled pretty descriptively!) I ordered prints for a few things I missed in 2002 and 2003, and then all of 2004 (skipping some lame random things from around the house and stuff) I’ll get to 2005 and 2006 later… for now I’ve got plenty to work with :)

My next decision involved this: Do I want to go full-out scrap-happy on these pictures, or do I want to do something simpler like Jessica did? Or, perhaps a combination of those? Some events I’d really like to ‘do up right’, with some fancy papers and things, like our wedding or my sister’s wedding, or our trip to Italy. But some things, like Labor Day 2004 or the third camping trip with our friends… don’t necessarily warrant a whole involved spread of lettering and stencils and stamps and stickers. But I still want to journal a bit.

So I organized all of my many envelopes (I think there are around 40, plus the new order I placed with PhotoWorks today) into ‘categories’: those I wanted to have fancy layouts for, and those I’d be content with just putting on a page with a short description of the event. (Just a side note: my ‘fancy layouts’ are NOTHING compared to some people’s… I typically keep it pretty simple, with 1 or 2 colors of paper for borders, maybe a themed stamp or sticker, and a nice title written in marker from one my stencils- voila! Instant page!)

After a few hours, I was ready to get started! I chose my first envelope (chronologically, of course- I’m anal like that) and I started to lay out the pictures. They had already been cropped (like 2 years ago when I went on a cropping spree, heh) so all I had to do was put some paper down and arrange the photos. Then, sadly, my happy little scrapping party was brought to an end- I only had about 10 little sticky tab thingies (or photo mounts, if you want to get technical) so I couldn’t even finish one page. heh. So I have everything still laid out on the card table in the office, with the door closed of course. I do not trust our cats (imagine that).

In any event, I at least feel like I got a start! I have a better idea of what I’d like to do, and that helps a lot with the overwhelmed feeling I got when first thinking about tackling the thousands of pictures I have. If I just take it 1 envelope at a time, hopefully I can get caught up by April! (just humor me and let me imagine that it’s possible, okay?)

just what I need, a new project

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