How to get caught up in scrapbooking your photos

September 20th, 2007

Here’s my somewhat unsolicited advice. Forget it. It ain’t gonna happen. At least not for the average scrapbooker like me (at least I THINK average) who takes boatloads of photos every week. I’m literally not going to live long enough to get all these thousands upon thousands of photos into scrapbooks, even if I pare them down and only use the very best ones. So I don’t try to catch up anymore. What you have to do is LET IT GO. I know, easier said than done. But it’s what I have done and I am so much happier. I’m a happier scrapper. I don’t feel pressured anymore. I still have my photos that I want to scrapbook pulled out and sorted into months, but now instead of going along chronologically I sift through my photos and see which ones “speak” to me. Then I scrapbook those, no matter which month’s envelope they’re in. No pressure. Just putting my memories down on paper.

Something else I do is NOT scrap every single photo. Just pick out the best ones. Especially for events such as birthday parties. Do you really need to scrapbook EVERY photo of the opening of EVERY gift from the party? Twenty years from now is your kid going to care about each and every gift they received that day? I don’t think my kid will, so I stopped scrapbooking every photo like that. I also don’t need to scrapbook the 4 photos of the cake that my insane husband took. They all look the same, honey! :) I pick out the best photos. The ones I love or the ones my little girl loves. The ones where she’s with special people or best friends. Then the others go in a box labeled by year and month.

At first it was hard to change my way of scrapbooking like this. But I have found that it is so freeing that the longer I do it, the easier it gets. I think it’s probably because it makes me happier. And it’s always easier to do things that make us happy, right? Speaking of making me happy, I think I’ll go scrapbook right now!