Where to Start

by Ang

I don't scrapbook anymore. Not like I used to. It's time consuming when you don't have an entire room to dedicate to the hobby (where you can shut the door so your cats don't jump up on the table and ruin your pages-in-progress). It's a lot of work to drag all of your supplies out if you only have 1 or 2 hours a week to dedicate to it.

About a year ago though, I came up with a new way of scrapbooking. Well, I'm sure it's not NEW (some other genius probably thought of it before I did) but it was new to me. I decided to give it a try with my pictures from Costa Rica 3 years ago.

I bought a cute photo album that looked sort of island-y, with 4 places for photos per open-page spread.


For each open-page spread, I would place 2-3 pictures in the slots, then leave the remaining slot(s) open. The open slot is the one I would 'scrapbook' with patterned paper, stickers, stamps, flowers, journaling, etc. It was sooooo much easier than the traditional scrapbook and I loved how it turned out.

I've never been a big fan of busy pages with just one photo on them. The focus of the book should be the pictures, not the embellishments on the page.

So from here on out, this is how I'm going to do it. But now comes the task of paring down my mounds of supplies. With my newfound way of simplifying my photo albums, I'm not going to need all of THIS:

I'm not getting rid of everything though. I love patterned paper and flowers, so I'll be keeping a lot of that. But I'll be selling a lot of my tools. I don't want to drag all of this to New Mexico with me. I'm going to start going through it this week and hopefully will make a lot of progress by the weekend.

Less is more!

P.S. - Costa Rica is AWESOME.