Splitcoaststampers.com - the world's #1 papercrafting community
You're currently viewing Splitcoaststampers as a GUEST. We pride ourselves on being great hosts, but guests have limited access to some of our incredible artwork, our lively forums and other super cool features of the site! You can join our incredible papercrafting community at NO COST. So what are you waiting for?
I am not new to scrapbooking but haven't done a whole lot. I just started in the last five years and I have 27 years of marriage and children that I would like to scrapbook.
For those who started later in life, how do you decide what pics to do and what order do you do them in? I'm feeling a little overwhelmed.
Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Tracy...I scrapped my first page in 2006 and it was another 2 years before I scrapped again and that was because I found SCS and finally became "brave" enough to try and follow challenges and then post them. I was in the same boat that you were in however I was raising a grandson and really wanted to have something for him to look at.
I started by choosing a challenge that inspired me and I would look for pics that fit the challenge. I do not ever do anything chronologically. I just pick photos that I really like and then scrap those. I mainly copy ideas that others do when it comes to traditional scrapping. In July of 2009 I took some lessons for Photoshop Elements and I rarely do traditional scrapping anymore.
Just pick something that you will enjoy doing and you'll find your groove that way. It's definitely more fun when you are having fun scrapping. Just save those pages and put them in order later! Good luck!
I do the current year first. It's fresher in my head and I can jot the memories down more easily. I know when the pictures were taken. Finishing one inspires me to go back a year or more.
__________________ Rachel Schott
As my best friend says, "Stamping....it's cheaper than therapy" to which I add, "Not by much".
My mom was the proud recipient of my first handmade card. Cost $200.
I started with a themed book - when my mother passed away, I went through all the family albums, copied many of the pictures and created an album for my brother to have. I then left it for several years.
When I came back to it, I just picked a moment in time to start from.
First, I have to say, I am a chronological scrapper - I don't do themed books. I just do pictures as they occur during the year - basically a year in our life, and I have one album per year.
All the pictures just prior to my son's birth (second child) and before were already in those slip in style photo albums. The pictures from just a month before his birth and everything forward were just in boxes, so I started there. I worked on all of the pictures and just kept going forward to present day. Once I got caught up to the present day, I would pull pictures from the earlier years in reverse chronological order. So, in essence I was working both forward to present day, and backward to the start of the pictures.
15 years later, I have scrapped 19 years worth of pictures, and completely up to date to January 2012, and have approx. 5 years of pictures from 1987 to 1992 left to do.
Now, I do have to say that because I scrapped both forward and backward and the same time, it looks like I really regressed in my "skills and techniques" in the middle of my books, as my style has changed fairly significantly from when I started. It is rather funny to go through and see the albums representing the late 80's looking much better than albums representing the mid to late 90's - one would expect it to be the other way around!
__________________ Elizabeth
---------------------------------------
Hand over the chocolate, and no one will get hurt!
Elizabeth~I have been doing something similar but not to the extent that you have. Which things did you scrap, I have been doing the school pics (because they are easy) and did all three boys births and then I have done their Proms and graduations. Did you scrap all the birthdays and random pics from each year?
Thanks so much for your input ladies, I tend to over think things....
Elizabeth~I have been doing something similar but not to the extent that you have. Which things did you scrap, I have been doing the school pics (because they are easy) and did all three boys births and then I have done their Proms and graduations. Did you scrap all the birthdays and random pics from each year?
Thanks so much for your input ladies, I tend to over think things....
Tracy
Sorry, been offline the last couple of days.....
I scrap everything - birthdays, celebrations, holidays, as well as random stuff too (pictures of the dogs, backyard landscaping, the doves that next in our tree every year), and even completely off the wall stuff periodically - it is basically just a chronological depiction of our lives. I do one book to represent each year.
__________________ Elizabeth
---------------------------------------
Hand over the chocolate, and no one will get hurt!
There are so many ways to approach this, but here is the way I do it when I'm scrapping older photos. Look through them, and see which ones "speak" to you. Is there a story that is just begging to be told, or a memory that just has to be written down? I think the story of your family is very important, and the feelings that you have about the people in it. Let the photos tell you where to begin. Have fun!
Tracy,
I am doing the same after 24 years of marriage and 2 children in college (what was I thinking??). I started with a pregnancy through first birthday for each child, then an album for each child that contains first birthday through starting school. After that I did an album for all the school years (one album total for each child). Now I am working on an album that has all of our Christmases in it. After that, I am going for an album for every year. My craft closet and the bonus room floor looks like a tornado hit it at times. I have to just walk away from it some days because it is overwhelming and life is happening at the same time. I will finish eventually.......best of luck to you!
Melissa
I really like the advice of starting with photos that speak to you. I started scrapbooking probably 11 years ago now, and I am mostly through all of the photos of my family up to 2005-2006, and then I started doing more backwards and forwards stuff, plus did a huge album for a Disney trip we did. I do not have albums for each child, I have 11+ albums that timeline our family life to some extent. I find there is a lot less pressure this way to "keep up" with one or another album.
I would often be stuck for months at a time because I really struggled to scrapbook the old photos and felt like I had to scrapbook ALL of them because with film cameras, I would print a whole roll of course!
I was SO happy to get to digital photos because I can pick and choose which photos to work with, and can even crop them digitally so that my layouts are more vibrant - so much less background to crop out manually. I know I could have had photos enlarged, etc from back in the day, but that was too much work and really not fitting my creative style. I am much more willing now to scrapbook anything, in any order - and even just ONE photo! I took part in the ABC Virtual Scrapbook Night last summer (thread is here: MASTER THREAD: ABC/123 VSBN by Mary_Pat419 at Splitcoaststampers) and that was AWESOME for just getting me busy working on pages in whatever order the pictures worked for the pages in. Totally helped break me of the feeling like I had to do things in a certain way or a certain order!!
Like Terry, I really like to have a layout in mind when I get started - whether I'm scrapbooking traditionally with paper or digitally. Either way, it takes a lot of the guess work out of what to put where, and it makes my pages much more interesting to look at (I think). Journaling has always been really important to me - at minimum who's in the photo, when and where it was taken. Often I will write a paragraph about what was happening. Choosing a relatively current events to get started, that you have great photos from, is a good first step because your memory of the event is fresh, the photos are easier to layout because they're clear and bright!
I think the other thing that I would suggest is to NOT go nuts in the scrapbook aisles or scrapbook stores. You can be quickly overwhelmed with a huge stash of supplies or trying to decide what goes together if you get too intent on shopping.
Most of all, as Terry said, HAVE FUN! It isn't a race to get everything scrapbooked, it really is a labor of love.
__________________ Terri
Paper Crafty Goals for 2013: 50/135 pages and 185/75 cards.
Where to start?
