Monday, August 30, 2010

On Scrapbooking

I have been scrapbooking for as long as I can remember. Over the years, I have kept a variety of different types of scrapbooks. I have travel books starting in college with trips to Florida, DC, South Dakota, and North Carolina/Virginia. I have special occasion books like my UT graduation and my wedding (and a separate album for pre-wedding stuff). I have paraphernalia books where I have movie ticket stubs, cards, event programs, newspaper articles, etc. For Nicholas' RISD graduation present, I scrapbooked his life (in a futile attempt to get rid of the box of stuff we keep moving to different places).
Monthly scrapbooking/hanging with the girls was something I started doing with some friends in Rhode Island. My friend, Jill, had really neat scrapbooking tools. As I finished my wedding scrapbooking a few days short of our first anniversary, I was contemplating what to do next. Jill does yearly albums that incorporate everything for the year. I thought that sounded like a great idea since I was keeping separate albums for different "things."
I started with Christmas 2008. It filled up the whole album with a few added pages. I should have realized that was not a good sign for my "year" album. So that album became the Christmas 2008/2009 album, and I started fresh with January 2009.
I just finished my 2009 album. I think I added around 60 extra pages... Apparently married life, living in a vacation destination (a.k.a not the same place I have lived all my life), and the purchase of a digital camera equate to a whole lot of scrapbooking. Of course, I am sure I would have less to scrapbook about if there were fewer "big" life events in our lives, or if I had fewer siblings, nieces, and nephews, or if we didn't like to travel. Did I mention that my 2009 scrapbook does not include RISD graduation, our trip to New Hampshire after graduation with Nicholas' family, our 2 week road trip from Providence to Austin, nor Christmas?!?!
I have been brainstorming other options, because I am sure that our growing family will not limit the amount of scrapbooking I have in a year. (On a side note, I did stop saving movie ticket stubs years ago.) Ever since Nicholas moved to Providence, and I started flying to see him all the time, I have been doing a lot more traveling overall. I take few "long" trips and a whole lot of short trips which means that my old way of scrapbooking travel really isn't feasible anymore.
So here is my approach for 2010--since there are some things that I still want to keep on paper (graduation/party announcements, thank you cards, etc.), I will do a 2010 scrapbook on paper, but hope to condense it in comparison to 2009. I am only going to print and scrap pictures of travel outside of Texas and major events. For example, my trip to DC in Jan, our Boston/RI trip in Feb, Cam's wedding, LJ's graduation, our June trip to California for my nephew's graduation, and our recent trip to Minnesota. BUT because I still want documentation of EVERYTHING I am also going to make online photo books of everything else going on in our lives. The current plan is to possibly break up the photo books by season, but I might have to price comparison on the cost of making a new book vs. adding pages to a book. The theory is that doing more online stuff will be cheaper than investing in stickers/paper/albums for "manual" scrapbooking, will get done faster, and will hopefully take up less of my time (and last longer).

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