So I’m in the grocery store yesterday when I see this cute under-sized magazine at the checkout lane. It is called Scrapbooks Made Easy 12 cool album ideas. Make one tonight! Of course I grab it right away. Not often I get to make a scrapbooking impulse buy at the grocery store.

This little magazine is a dynamo. Not so much for the layout ideas (although there are some cute ones) but more for the guilt reduction. You know, the stuff we scrapbookers make ourselves crazy over - cropping every picture, not doing anything unless everything is perfect, stuff like that.

A quick glance at the section headings alone offered me some relief from the self-induced stress of scrapbooker’s perfectionism.

It’s never too late.
Lose the guilt.
Leave most of your photos in the box
Celebrate your life

Here is an excerpt from the final section, Quality, not quantity:

“It’s easy to get excited about scrapbooking and start seeing everything with ’scrapbooker’s eye.’ Suddenly, everything is a layout waiting to happen. You dress your kids in shirts that match the paper you just bought and take them tot he park to take a picture for a scrapbook page. If you snap the photo and rush home to make your page, you’ve missed the point. If you take the photo, then put the camera away and have a great time playing on the swings, there is still hope for you! Scrapbooks are for saving memories and telling stories, but first you have to live them.”

These great concepts are interwoven with good ideas for album themes for baby, school, vacation, holiday, birthday and family. All in all, this was a great impulse buy. Well worth the $3.99. When you see this little mag co-produced by Simple Scrapbooks and Soap Opera Digest, go ahead and get it. If you aren’t seeking the latest, greatest, whiz-bang layouts but good concepts and ideas about scrapbooking, you’ll be glad you did.

My friend, Kim Wolinski (aka Dr. DeClutter) has an excellent e-zine about decluttering called Dr. DeClutter’s Organizing Tips & Tools Newsletter. In her Q&A column this week she wrote about how to organize the massive amounts of school projects that come home all the time.

Dear Dr. DeClutter,

School is around the corner and I’m already dreading all those
“creative crafts” and materials that the kids will bring home from
school. What’s the best way to organize these things and what
do I keep?

Too much Schooltime Joy!, Destin, FL

Dear Joy!

Millions of parents are feeling overwhelmed already just like you!
A few years ago my mom gave me a box, a 12X10X5 inch
cardboard box. It had several projects and class worksheets
from my 3rd Grade Year! Just smelling that old glue and construction
paper took me right back to that classroom, back into my
3rd Grade body. I don’t think I have memories from back then,
but when we actually can see, smell and touch “artifacts” from
our past, the memories come alive again. It’s a good thing!

Here are some simple answers.

1)
Make files that are kept in the kitchen or the area of the
house where everyone knows where to find them. Label them:
a) School projects;
b) Activities, like sports and plays;
c) Parent/Teacher meetings;
c) Papers to READ & SIGN;
d) and other such files specific to your school and children’s activities so that nothing gets lost.

2)
An extra tip here: Put up a Family Calendar too with every
activity noted.

When arts and crafts and worksheets with stars on them start
showing up, do this:

3)
Keep on the “best of the best” and show on the refrigerator or
wall for a week or two. When the “next best” comes through,
replace it — get rid of the rest!

4)
Get the really large lidded tubs for storage. Label each with
a child’s name. In it goes “the best of the best each week.” Only
one or two items is good. When it gets half-full and there’s still
plenty of school year left, cull it out and complete it for the
year. School class assignments are in this same category.

5)
Use their paintings and art as show pieces on your walls.
Get inexpensive but colorful frames and frame their paintings
and drawings. Put them in the hall, kitchen and other walls
to showcase their work. They will feel very loved and honored
when you do this and they can show their friends and other
guests. A great way to support encouraging high self-worth
in your children.

6)
Plan on a mantle, shelf or other area for trophy’s and such.
Make sure to always have a “place of honor” for their creative
productions.

I hope these tips, tools and techniques are helpful!

Do you have a question for Dr. DeClutter? Email your question to
kimwolinski@msn.com . Type Dear Dr. DeClutter in the subject line,
write your question and see it answered in a future newsletter edition.

Life’s too short to keep dealing with the same stuff over and over again!

Thanks, Kim for that great article. Since yesterday was the first day of school I am not too far behind for this year to be the one that is well organized.

You can sign up for Dr. DeClutter’s e-zine here.

My friend Carolyn over at CropChic posted a great article about Preparing for a Crop. Her first of four terrific suggestions is:

Pick one album, project or up to three layouts to complete. Before you set off for the crop, know what you want to do. If you’re going to a 4-hour crop, it may make more sense to do a few layouts. If you’re going to a weekend/marathon event, try working on an album. Either way, set a scrapbooking course and follow it.

I also suggest having a secondary project and bring it along. In one instance I actually finished up the project I had brought, leaving me hours to organize my supplies and gaze at idea books wishing I had something else to work on. Another time, the creativity just wouldn’t flow for my chosen project. So now I always bring a couple different projects.

Be sure to check out Carolyn’s other three suggestions here. And have fun cropping!

Just returned from our Alaska cruise and our laptop’s hard drive is bursting at the seams with digital photos. Honestly, we took at least 1000 photos during our week-long trip. Now I am faced with getting them organized before I can even begin to scrapbook our trip.

This is new to me. We’ve never used a digital camera before as our primary camera. I’ve grabbed my Simple Scrapbooks, A Simple Guide to Easy Organization, special issue magazine and culled a few tips from it:

- Organize the photos into folders with different category names
- Print out an index print and store it with the CD for long term storage

Sound simple enough, but I’m sure that there is more to it than that.
Do you have any tips for organizing digital photos?

Just got an email from Jo-Ann stores announcing Creating Keepsakes products are now exclusively available in their store. It says they have scrap totes, albums, storage units, kits and CKOK-Scrappin’ Creations embellishments. So I popped online to see what I could find.

While it appears that their online selection is still limited, there is one item in particular that caught my eye. It is the Creating Keepsakes Basic Essential Tote that is not just an empty tote, but comes stuffed with scrapping stuff from Creating Keepsakes. (I tried to grab the photo to paste in here, but it is not grabbable.) Here is what is included in this cool looking bag:

Kit Includes:
* Fabric Tote
* Trimmer
* 12″ deckled edge ruler
* Set of 3 pens
* 25 sheets of cardstock
* Scissors
* 4″x6″ photo organizer
* 12″x12″ paper holder
* Sketch book
* Tool guide

It is $99.99 but this week at their online store, they have a 50% off coupon which does appear to apply to Creating Keepsakes products. That is a pretty good value!

Just thought I would share this. I am going to take a minute to stop my local JoAnn store too to see what the offline selection is too. Could be fun. (Or dangerous…you know, to the pocketbook =:)

Just got my September 2005 issue of Creating Keepsakes in the mail and one of the articles caught my eye and my mind space. Rachel Thomae writes in her article Scrapbook Your Way about the five starting off points for creating scrapbook pages.

Creating Keepsakes - $ 24.97
From: MagazinesQuick.com

Basically she says that we start a page with one of the five elements in mind and then create from there. Her thought is that no one way is “right” or “wrong” but that we each have a natural tendency. The five starting off points she mentions are:

Photographs
Supplies
Design
Art
Words

Obviously the article goes into some great detail about how you can tell which is your natural style and gives some suggestions for getting started with each one. She evens passes out Permission Slips for going outside your usual style.

It is a great article and I highly advise grabbing your CK (Sept 2005 issue, page 113) and see what Rachel has to say.

As for me, I know my natural style is not to start with Supplies since I just went to ScrapYourTrip.com to see if could get some stuff for our upcoming Alaska cruise. But when I looked at all the great stuff I just couldn’t decide. Even though I know I’m going to Alaska and will undoubtedly do an album on the trip, I don’t know yet what the “tone” of the trip will be. I don’t know what the photos will be like. So how could I buy supplies yet?

Do you have a sense of what your natural style is?
How do you start an album or a layout?

An article in the August 2005 issue of Creating Keepsakes magazine by Faye Morrow Bell about using 15 minute blocks of time to organize your scrapbooking got me thinking about how being organized would really help me to get more scrapbooking done (and have more fun doing it).

One of the reasons I don’t scrapbook more often is that I don’t have something ready to go. I think about running into my scrapbook room to work on a page or a layout and I realize that it will take the entire time I have available just to get ready to scrapbook.

So, I’m going to follow Faye’s advice and spend 15 minute blocks of time in my scrapbooking room - just getting organized. When I have a few minutes instead of plopping down on the couch to watch another TV show I will head into my room. Here are a couple of the dozens of ideas she shares in the article.

Journal a memory.
Without worrying about what it looks like or even if there is a picture to go along with it, just write down a memory.

Shop.
Go through your inventory and see what you’re running low on. Do you have enough adhesive? Pages? Page protectors? Make a quick list of what you need and with your next 15 minutes jump online and order your necessary supplies.

Unshop.
Go through one supply (card stock, stickers, accents) and get rid of items you know you won’t ever use. I had a giant bunny sticker for years. It got to be a running joke with my scrappin friends when at each yearly weekend crop I STILL had the giant bunny. Finally, I gave it to my daughter and she used it within minutes.

Here are a few more places to get organizing ideas:

Get Organized Today
Tips, tools and techniques on organizing our lives inside and out. Motivational tips to live life with less stress and trauma. Humor to lighten your daily load. Education for goal setting, personal growth and bringing order to everyday life.

Sometimes my scrapbooking seems to be all about holidays, family events or special occasions. As if our life is only comprised of these special events. But in reality, we spend more time just living our normal life. Shouldn’t the regular days of our life be included in our scrapbooks? I think so.

Rebecca Sower, one of my favorite scrapbooking authors, wrote a book called Scrapbooking Life’s Little Moments and it is all about that. What a great book. By the time I read the first few tips I felt inspired to journal more, to capture more of the details that make up my life and flat out wanted to cry just thinking about some of the emotions I could capture.

For the record, I do not easily cry. Nor am I an overly emotional person. Frankly, I am working on feeling more emotions and connecting my head and my heart. So Rebecca’s book is perfect for me right now.

Creating Keepsakes - Scrapbooking Life’s Little Moments by Rebecca Sower

Here are a couple of the thought emotion-provoking questions she suggests highlighting in a scrapbook page:

What does it mean to you to curl up with your little one each evening to read a bedtime story?

What does it meant o you when you hear your national anthem and see your nation’s flag wave?

I highly recommend this book!

Are you a Rebecca Sower fan too?

I just signed up for Angie Pedersen’s (the author of three bestselling scrapbooking books - see below) free class at Barnes&Noble University. The class, called Scrapbooking Basics, is taught online and is totally free. You can read more about Angie’s class here.

These B&N University classes are pretty fun and are very easy technology-wise. Try it - you’ll like it. =:)

Here are Angie’s books:

Figuring out how to store your scrapbook paper so you can find what you want when you want it is an age-old dilemma for us scrappers. I should have known that Cynthia Townley Ewer (aka the “CEO”) over at OrganizedScrapbooks.com would have a truly unique solution.

Here’s what she says:

Professional organizers will tell you that when it comes to paper, vertical storage beats horizontal every time. For everyday filing needs, hanging file folders make it easy to find and retrieve papers and records. No shifting and sorting stacks of paper; just flip, drag and drop!

Solution: make your own.

To see her step-by-step instructions (with photos) on how to make your own scrapbook folders read this article by Cynthia.