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I am usually behind in my scrapbooking by about a year and I’ve come to accept that. So imagine my surprise when I recently discovered I was now 2 years behind. Well I was very annoyed at myself for letting it get that far behind. It simply meant I haven’t been scrapbooking as much as I usually do. So now the question – what do I do about it?

At work the buzz word? is ‘work smarter’. So I took their advice and applied it to my world of scrapbooking and I decided to ‘Scrap Smarter’, and it worked. Here’s what I did.

Clean

You will need to clean your scrap area ensuring that your tools and accessories are in their homes allowing you plenty of room to sort through your products and organise your scrapbooking.

Photo selection

• Sort your photos into bundles for each page. You will need to decide if you need a single page or double page layout.
• Once you are happy with the bundles take each bundle and work out which photos you want to scrap and which ones to place in storage. You don’t need too many photos of the one thing, just pick your best photos and scrap these.
• Keep your final selection of photos in respective piles. (I keep mine in a shoe organiser which hangs over my door.

Paper selection

• Take your first page of photos and think about what colour papers would go with your photos.
• Sort through your papers and select no more than 3-5 papers you would like to use.
• Spread your papers over the work bench so they overlap and then place your photos on top of the papers.

  Embellishment selection

• Taking into account your photos think about what accessories would go with your page, this will be dependent with your theme ie baby girl photos you could use flowers, hearts and stars etc
• Once you have an idea about what items you want to use think about what form and colour you have available ie flowers – do you have paper flowers, flower brads, rub-on flowers etc
• Sort through your stash and match your requirements with your photos and papers.
• Items you might consider – brads, flowers, eyelets, ribbons, paper tearing, rub-ons, stickers, stamps and chipboard.
• Don’t forget to use your already existing stash of supplies. If you don’t have a particular embellishment that you really want you can make one with paper piecing. Google paper piecing patterns or better yet use colouring in book pages as templates for paper piecing.
• Place your selected embellishments on top of your papers and photos. Don’t forget to include the paint/ink if you are using products which require painting or inking.
• Use post-it notes to jot down any ideas for each page including the page title or to draw a mini sketch so you don’t forget later.

Organisation

• Now you have your photos, papers and accessories ready in a kit format.
• Pack up each kit keeping all your products together and be careful not to mix them up. (I used 13 x 13 zip lock bags for each kit. Another idea is to use a large (clean) pizza box storing your pages on top of one another ensuring you keep the first page for scrapbooking on the top.
• Gather together all the tools you will need and place in a box ie paper trimmer, adhesives, scissors, pens, ruler, scraps bucket etc

You are now ready to scrap your kits. I recommend you scrap in a different place to your usual scrap area. If you have a room I recommend you abandon your room and take over the kitchen table. You don’t want to get side tracked by all your other scrapbooking items.