scrapbooking more simply

I have a lot of photos stuffed into boxes of Juniordwarf as a baby and a toddler. They’re all sorted by date and I’ve written down exactly what I have in a very large book. For some of them, I’ve gone so far as to roughly sketch the layout I’m going to do.

I know that I don’t have to put all of these photos into an album – that really I’d be best focusing on the important ones and getting those out of the way, rather than going back over piles of baby photos that are often very similar.

But when I start to deal with the ‘important’ photos (milestones, birthdays, notable events), I convince myself that each one needs a sensational layout to do the occasion justice. So I’ll often start one of these layouts, get halfway through it and then not really know how to finish it off. And into the ‘work-in-progress’ file it goes, never to see the light of day again.

Except when I pull it out to finish it, still not know what to do with it, and put it back.

Clearly this approach isn’t working for me.

Last night when I was getting ready to go to scrapbooking I decided to take a different approach. I figured that the photos would be better in an album rather than in a box, even if they’re only roughly stuck on a page. At least if they’re in an album, I can look at them. I decided to grab a single month’s worth of photos and work my way through them, sticking them onto pages with minimal embellishment. None of them were particularly significant photos, they’re 7 years old so I’m not really attached to them (in so far as you can detach yourself from any picture of your child), and they weren’t particularly good photos, so it didn’t matter if they weren’t spectacularly scrapped.

‘Less pressure = more productivity’ was my theory.

It worked. I got through three layouts last night, which is probably more than I’ve completed to date this year.

Hooray!

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