You’ve come back from vacation and you’re thrilled at the pictures you got from your exciting adventure. You can’t wait to scrapbook them, but when you pull out those photos, a haze of confusion and overwhelm takes over. What should be a pleasurable visit with your memories is becoming a dreaded “obligation.”

Do you feel this way? I’m working on an album right now for our Disney vacation and I have a method for assembling this type of project that coincides with my philosophy of scrapbookers as story-tellers and scrapbooks as visual memoirs. It will also simplify the process and keep your mind clear.

Over the next week and a half I’ll share my step-by-step process with you, using my Disney vacation as the example. If you have a stack of photos and memories from a vacation that you need to scrap, I hope you’ll pull them out and follow along with each step. You can even give us a report of your progress by leaving a comment.

Step 1: Begin with 2 Fundamental Questions In Mind

1. What are the stories I want to remember from my vacation?
The funny things someone said * The thoughts and feelings you had at various times * The way a relationship developed * The things you did you did, saw, or experienced.

2. What is the overall story or underlying theme that encapsulates all of the smaller individual stories?
This is a deeper question that requires some thought. Each vacation has its own meaning. If you take some time to identify this early in the process, you’ll be able to create a complete and cohesive story out of the many pages, pictures, and smaller stories.

You don’t have to answer all of these questions now before moving onto step number two. Having the questions on your mind while you proceed to the next step is just fine. Have a pencil and some note cards next to you on the table so you can jot down each thought, story, or theme idea as they come. Having each story on its own note card will allow you to place them with their coinciding photos.

The Theme Of My Disney Vacation

While I’ve been working on the next steps, I’ve been thinking about the word, “present,” in all of its senses, for my Disney album. Here is what I mean:

1. One of our days at Disneyland was a present from my parents. The other day and the rest of the trip was Izzy’s and my own Christmas present to our kids.

2. It was an awesome experience to be present with my parents and the two siblings closest to me in age, at a place that holds so many childhood memories with them. I had such pleasurable moments, enjoying my sister and brother as if we were kids again.

3. Together we relived some wonderful times from our past, while mixing them with the present. It is such a joy to give to my children the happy experiences that my parents gave to me.

How Will Step One Benefit you?

1. Sometimes having a theme will provide you some visual images, icons, embellishment ideas, or colors. The story of Disney as a part of my childhood that I am gifting to my children gave me the idea to capitalize on a classic Disney icon that identifies Disney from any time period: the Mickey Mouse ears silhouette. I decided to use that icon as the major embellishment throughout my album, rather than buy new Disney products.

I may also use some clock and time images, and perhaps classic gift images.

2. Sometimes having a theme will provide you with title ideas. Titles of different pages in my album could be…

A present to us.
A present to you.
Present And In The Moment.
Present Again With You.

Step number one isn’t a step you can easily do when you’re cropping with friends. For most every project, I like to take some quiet time to dig deep and relive moments–to gain from those times all over again. I do it best with a pencil in my hand so I can solidify my thoughts and give them some life. My notes tend to be organic and unstructured, just like my thoughts.

Prepare For The Next Step

Tomorrow we’ll cover the next couple of steps, having to do with sorting the photos. You’ll want to print up your photos if you’re following along and you haven’t done so already.

Don’t worry about whether you’ll want enlargements unless you already know which ones you’ll enlarge and in what size. I printed all my photos to 4×6, knowing that I will later want to enlarge some of them. Since I don’t know which ones I want larger yet, it’s easier to just print them all up front so I have something physical to work with in my hands while I plan the structure and size of my album.

Your assignments:

1. Get some note cards, a pencil, and write down the following questions:

*What are the stories I want to remember from my vacation?
*What is the overall story or underlying theme that encapsulates all of the smaller individual stories?

2. Print up all of the photos you might put in your vacation scrapbook. Don’t worry about sizes or whether you have an album or not. That’ll come later.

I’m looking forward to following these steps with you.

* * *

This is part one of a series, Stories From Our Vacations.

Free TV Show from Ustream

DISCLAIMER:
The host of this show has a tendency to mis-speak, forget words, or say the opposite of what she means when talking about technical stuff as she was doing in this video. ;)

Show Summary

We didn’t scrapbook during the live show last night. Instead, we shared some very basic instruction for digital SLR’s. I also showed my four lenses and some other fun camera gadgets. If this is a subject you’re interested in, I hope you enjoy the recording.

By the way, you should know ahead of time that my explanation for focal length in the video is technically…ummm…totally wrong.

Stories From Our Vacations

Do you have summer trips to immortalize? If your trips produced a lot of stories and a lot of photos, you may be feeling a mixture of excitement and overwhelm when it comes to putting it all together. This week we will begin a series of posts that will take you step-by-step through the process of gathering and making sense of all those photos and memories.

You will be able to turn the pieces of your trip into an album that tells a complete story. The first steps will begin either Wednesday night or Thursday morning and will continue into the following week.

Paperclipping Live

A wonderful part of my own vacations has been photography practice. I’ve never read the user manual of my camera and I’ve never taken a formal class. Izzy teaches me photography while we are on vacation.

For Paperclipping Live, we’ll pull out our SLR’s and talk about the basics of using the manual settings on a digital camera. Since I’ve never been a professional, and professional terms and assumptions aren’t swimming in my head, I think I’ll be able to put it into terms that the most clueless of us will understand.

We’ll start tonight at 6:30pm PST and are likely to finish by 7:30 or earlier. If you’re unsure of the time zone difference, look for your city on this website and then compare it to my city, which is Phoenix.

Remember to register for Skype (it’s free) if you’d like to call into the show to ask a question.

Scrap Embellishment Marathon

I enjoyed the comment Amy left after watching this week’s episode of Paperclipping, Create Your Own Embellishments:

Noell
loved this idea gave me an idea of my own I am going to do some “embellishment olympics” this week using your tip—–I have a lot of scraps that I am going to “cut out” and make into embellishment so I have a stash of them while I watch the olympics. Needing to give some new life to papers I haven’t used and think it might be nice to have a whole pile of these to go through when I need them. Also an excuse to get some use out of what I have so I can get my hands on some of the new stuff starting to hit the stores!!! thanx for the tip-Amy

I had my own homemade embellishment marathon on Sunday. I wanted to make embellishments for the vacation album I am working on. I had a great time with Aiden, looking for scraps and leftovers with certain characteristics that I could use to make my own Mickey Mouse silhouettes.

Whether you want to make a specific type of embellishment for a vacation album, or play with whatever comes to mind for a new store of goodies, try Amy’s idea some time when you have a chance to play. It will surprise you to realize all the great potential that is sitting in your stuff right now.

Would you like to save money by making your own embellishments? Today’s episode for Premium Subscribers should give you some ideas.

If you want to learn more about the premium membership so you can have access to all of the videos, click here.

No matter how good we are at using our scraps, if we do a lot of layouts, we’ll still end up with too many of them. Periodic purging is a good thing. One way to purge is to collect a pile to share with our children or grandchildren.

For The Artistically Inclined Child

My plan last week was to find some coloring book pages and teach my kids how to do mosaic art, using a coloring book drawing as the template. Since I was running low on time, I gave Trinity a bag of scraps and said, “You can have these. Why don’t you go do some art with them?”

No direction whatsoever.

Trinity came back a while later with the lovely picture above. How creative is that? I had no idea she’d make something so wonderful. This give-and-let-go method is perfect for artistic children who can get creative with almost anything. If your child is not so inclined, you may need to offer a little more guidance, like my mosaic idea.

For The Child Who Needs Direction

For the mosaic, have the child tear the scraps into small pieces. You may want to do it with him or her if that task seems tedious. Draw or choose a lined picture, and then fill in the empty spaces with the torn patterned pieces. Provide the child with some glue and a paint brush for adhering.

For Those With No Kids

You can still share your scraps with children, even if there aren’t any shorties in your own life. Offer your scraps to an elementary or preschool teacher. My son’s preschool artwork last year was often made with scraps of paper.

Yesterday I commented on all those wonderful forgotten patterns we find while looking through our scraps. Aren’t there also other patterns in there that turn you off? Negative vibes during creative time are not a good thing.

If you find yourself cringing at certain scraps in your stash, turn them over to a little person who may have something really cool to do with them. If your pile is so big that it’s hard to look through, share the abundance with your child or grandchild and watch their imagination go to work.

Huge apologies for having to start over since the old forum’s code got completely corrupted.

The Bad News

We have to get accustomed to the format of the new forums. We have to register again, download our pictures, again, and all that tedious stuff. =)

The Good News

This forum software should be faster and more reliable. Once we’re used to it it should be better. Also, I copied all the topic requests, so unless you made a request during that last week before the forums broke down, your topic should be on my list.

Where To Find Them

To play in the forums, just go to…

forums.paperclipping.com

Do you feel overwhelmed by an ever-growing amount of patterned paper scraps? It comes down to the way you look at them–whether you see those scraps as your partners or your enemies.

I love my scraps. I even love them more than my stash of brand new untouched patterned paper. It’s true! If you’d like to rekindle the romance between yourself and your discarded patterns, read on for a few tips.

1. Make the Scraps Your First Priority

Except when it’s important to use patterned paper as a 12×12 background, go to your patterned paper stash before looking at your full-sized sheets. Every time I dig through my scraps they surprise me with all their wonderful patterned potential–so many designs I forget about.

You’ll avoid unnecessary growth in scraps by using what’s already there, rather than add to the pile every time you make a layout.

2. Set Your Scraps Up For Easy Access

I used to separate my scraps in hanging file folders by color or holiday. That was back when I hated those scraps. It was a pain to put them away and it was a pain to pick them out. Then I read that Ali Edwards mixes her patterns together. Trying her method forever changed my relationship with those fun leftover pieces.

I now keep my larger scraps in a wooden serving tray and my tiny or narrow pieces in a long rectangular block candle holder. Both sit on my table, right next to me, within reach and eye-sight. I used to keep my cutting tool there, but I found it much more useful to have my scraps in reach instead.

3. Ignite New Enthusiasm With Unusual Mixing

It really is fun to dig through a pile of scraps. It’s like running into old friends. Seeing them next to other patterns you’ve never matched together will give you a new way of looking at them. You’ll discover combinations you would never have paired on purpose.

Just seeing my patterns mixed this way makes me want to make layouts. My pile of scraps is one of my actual sources for ideas and scrapbooking motivation.

4. Have Some Simple Go-To Templates

The layout at the top of this post is from one of my go-to templates. With this template I support a single photo with a group of square patterns from my scraps, and then I bridge them with a ribbon or line of some kind. Last, I add a title, a trio of embellishments (in this case, three word strips) and journal around the edge of the page. Easy but attractive.

Look through your favorite layouts and identify the ones that use smaller pieces of patterned paper. These can be templates for future layouts that you can go to again and again.

If you’ve seen your scraps as your enemy instead of your partners, try these tips. Not only will you save money and reduce waste and stress, you’ll also find a new muse full of unending inspiration.

Since so many of you like to watch the recorded videos of Paperclipping Live, I decided to embed them right into the Paperclipping blog so you don’t have to go hunting for them.

Here is last night’s show, where we used a previous scrapbook page that was great for using scraps as a template for a new one.

Scrap Your Scraps

This week we will focus on the subject we were going to enjoy last week but couldn’t…

Are you swimming in scraps? Some of us hate them. Some of us love ‘em. This week is all about those leftover pieces, large and small–how to store them; how to share them; how to use them.

Paperclipping Live

For our show tonight, I will share with you a template of a layout that is great for using up scraps. I’ll base tonight’s layout on that template.

You can follow along with me by creating your own with the same template. What you’ll need:

1. Two 4×6 photos.
2. One piece of 8.5×11 cardstock for your background.
3. Scraps that will work with your photos.

Note: I recommend you pin-point your story ahead of time so you can choose patterns and colors that support it. If you follow my template exactly, there is only room for a relatively small amount of journaling, so be sure to photos and a story that won’t require multiple paragraphs.

Paperclipping Live is Tuesday night at 6:30pm, PST.

If you’re unsure of the time zone difference, look for your city on this website and then compare it to my city, which is Phoenix.

Remember to register for Skype (it’s free) if you’d like to call into the show to ask a question or share something cool.

Next Week

While those in my town are returning to school, many of you still have a few more weeks and a vacation to go. We will spend next week and the following focusing on vacations–vacation layouts, minibooks, and albums. Can’t wait!

Have you been waiting to hear about Ali Edwards newest book, due to release any day now?

Listen to this week’s podcast (audio only) as I interview Ali and she shares all the secrets…

Interview With Ali Edwards on Sharing Your Story