About six years ago I taught a class at a local scrapbook store about scrapbooking "Monthly" pages. I loved the concept even though at the time I taught the class I wasn't really scrapbooking that way.
I scrapbook chronolocially. It is how my brain thinks and it is how I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. However, I also scrapbook pages for four separate albums: one for each of my kids and one I call the "family" album. Overkill? Yes, perhaps, I'm aware of that. I'm also aware that my children will have more scrapbooks than they can look through in a lifetime.
Before I went cold-turkey with the monthly thing I would scrapbook EVERYTHING. Every event. Every holiday. Every Every. Which meant: two page spreads for a trip to the pumpkin patch, two page spread for a day at the pool, two page spread for Halloween, two page spread for the first day of school, two page spread for Easter, two page spread for Valentine's day, two page spread for a trip to the zoo. I was going through one huge Creative Memories album every six months, if I was lucky. Something had to give...
So I decided to give that long-ago taught class idea a spin and see if I could really let go of separate pages for EVERYTHING we ever do. I embraced it, struggled at times, went with the flow and never looked back. Now, occasionally I will still do separate pages for things like birthdays, vacations, and some holidays, but I can complete an entire year of photos in about 24-32 pages, which also translates to about two-three years per album!!
To streamline the system even further I put together about fourteen large bags, one for each month, and one for heritage pages and one for travel. Inside each bag I have pattern paper and a whole bunch of random embellishments. There is no rhyme or reason and I have had to make some adjustments along the way. For instance, in September's bag the majority of the papers and the embellishments all centered around "back to school" but in September they have already been back to school the previous month and we do some fall-related things in September so I had to make some slight changes to the bag. I have also had to adjust June which featured mainly girly-Jennifer's-birthday type embellishments forgetting that I had to do June pages for the boys as well.
The hardest part was letting go of using all those cool embellishments I had collected over the past decade. What would I do with ALL those Halloween items since I was no longer scrapbooking Halloween pages? I simply use them up on "October's" pages. (And the same is true for any other "themed" embellishment.)
January gets a lot of snow, winter type embellishments; hearts for February; March-May are mainly spring type stuff featuring flowers, trees, birds, etc. June-August contain mainly summery items, pool, beach, vacation, etc.; November is full of anything Fall related and, of course, December is holiday embellishments. I'm not saying it is always perfect. Sometimes I don't have any pictures that work with the embellishments in the bag (like if August is full of water-type stickers and we never once stepped foot in a pool all month!). I solved that problem by including random-no theme related embellishments to each bag. Things like buttons, puzzle pieces, wax pieces, ribbons, and so on.
Let me tell you how EASY it is to GET THE PAGES COMPLETED! All I need to do is grab my photos and cardstock and the bag and I'm ready to work. No getting up and down looking for embellishments. No wondering what paper to pick. It is all in the bag. And, when I go to the occasional workshop it is super easy to pack up. Most times I can only complete one or two months, depending on how long the crop is, and so all I need is to pull cardstock and grab the two monthly bags and I'm ready to head out the door. Easy, right?
I also pull out the bags when I am sketching my layouts...it helps for me to see some of the embellishmetns I want to use up when I'm sketching so I can incorporate them into the page design.
I don't expect this to work for everyone. I realize that the chronological scrapbooker is dying in the way of disco, but for me it works great and I love the simplicity of it all. It is also a GREAT way to use up those once-forgotten about embellishments too!!!
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