Scrapbook Album Organization - Part I - Stamped Treasures, Sherry Roth, Stampin' Up! Demonstrator

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I had started a HUGE project well I’m going to share it with you today. The whole process will take a few posts, it has been taking me a lot longer than I anticipated but I’m glad that I decided to tackle it now, before things got any worse!

So here’s a bit of background on how I scrapbook… I’m not a chronological scrapbooker, I scrapbook the photos that I’m in the mood to scrapbook. When I finish a layout it goes into my most current album, whether they are photos from 2004 or 2012. So needless to say my albums are a hodgepodge of layouts, and I have LOTS of albums. Before I began this project I had 3 albums that were somewhat organized – my kids baby albums (although a few photos still need to be scrapbooked) and our Caribbean Cruise album. That was it!

So what I decided to do was take out ALL the layouts from ALL my albums and organize them – this is the result…

This was our spare bed – thank goodness we don’t have anyone coming to visit! Every inch of space in our guest room is covered – floor and all! Each pile represents a year or trip we took – boy I have scrapbooked a lot of photos from 2004! After removing all the layouts, I went through my boxes of certificates, misc. information (maps, artwork, awards etc.) and added those to the appropriate piles. Now I am working on adding the photos that haven’t yet been scrapbooked. These are currently in regular photo albums but they are being removed and added to the appropriate piles as well.

My intention isn’t to scrapbook every single photo, I have a plan for those that I don’t think I will scrapbook and you will see what that plan is in my next album organization post (next week). I just want to have everything together. For example, if the kids took a swimming lesson and i took photos, I want the photos with the certificate or badge that they earned. That way everything is organized and easy to find.

After starting this huge endeavor my biggest piece of advice is to organize your layouts right from the beginning! Have an album for each year and as you complete a layout, add it to the appropriate album. Here are a couple other points that I want to mention:

Some of my favourite photos have been scrapbooked more than once. I do have a solution for that though – you’ll see it in one of my future blog posts.
I will be converting all my albums to 12″x12″ ring albums (except for holiday or themed albums) so that I can easily add/remove/adjust pages as needed.
I plan on incorporating both 8-1/2″x11″ and 12″x12″ layouts into the albums. This works beautifully with our ring albums.
Something else that I noticed as I was sorting was the number of layouts that I have that have no photos in them! I have a stack about 8″ high! That’s a lot of pages.

This is a BIG project and I’m hoping it will be finished before the end of the month. I can’t set aside a lot of time for it but cannot leave that room in a mess like that for too long. So I set aside 1 hour every day to work on it. I started with 1999 (which was the year my daughter was born and the earliest layouts I have) and am working chronologically. It seems to be going pretty well. I will update you again next week, with what the room looks like and the next steps.

Thanks for stopping by today. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment, I’d be happy to answer them if I can.

Sherry

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Shae says

May 3, 2012 at 4:44 pm

I am excited to see how this project turns out. I am looking for a plan for my scrapbooking and most of my projects need to be caught up on. That's my goal for the summer off is to complete all of my half finished projects and unscrapbooked photos. I most certianly need a plan of action and can't wait to see what ideas you have come up with. Looking forward to Saturday's class. See you soon!

Anonymous says

May 4, 2012 at 3:23 am

I'm a quasi-new scrapbooker so my scrapbooks are still in relatively "decent" order…so far, anyway. I'm looking forward to seeing what advice you have for us, Sherry…my husband would bury me in the amount of paper you have there…hahahahaha
Sue Weir

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