Do you have an album close to completion?
This month at Paperclipping we’re finishing up a scrapbook that’s almost done (and hiding those unsightly back sides that so many of us have in our books!).
Play along with us! We’re starting now…
Choose the Scrapbook You’re Completing
I’m going to finish an album I titled, Everyday Life. Because I work on lots of albums at once (of different subjects or stories), I’ve been adding to this album for many years now and I’m ready to just finish it all and be done with it!
Look Through Your Scrapbook Album
- Note the empty, problematic, or missing stuff (it’s often the ugly stuff like back sides of pages).
- Find the underlying potential story.
- Identify what’s missing from the album and/or what should be moved.
The second step is optional (but awesome!). If your album is 100% chronological or 100% random — and you want to keep it that way — then step 2 may or may not apply. If it does not, skip step 2 and move onto step 3.
Let’s dig into these steps and I’ll share my own results with you…
Step 1. Note the Empty, Problematic, or Missing Stuff
- If you scrap chronologically, maybe you left a page to be completed later.
- If you vary your page sizes then you probably have backs to fill.
- Is there missing journaling?
I have at least five page backs to fill. Also, my Everyday Life album contains a section of pages I made to document a week of our life and it pops out of nowhere with no explanation. It’s jarring and confusing. So I need to add some explanations. It also involves some unusual style pages that are difficult to turn.
Step 2. Find the Story
My albums start with a general subject. As I go through this process of finishing an album, I tend to find a subtle story underneath all the life snippets of my scrapbook pages. It’s really exciting! If you don’t see a story thread in yours right away, don’t brush off this step immediately. It might take time.
For example, at first I didn’t see anything more in this album than the fact that each pages reveals an aspect of our everyday life. That’s enough of a story. But now that it’s almost done and I’ve been looking more carefully at my pages to see what’s missing, I realized there is a recurring theme throughout this album, which covers a spam of years…
There are lots and lots of pages about big and small changes that we’ve made.
Not every layout in this album is about a big change, but I can take this concept and do something more with my new story theme before it’s totally done.
I love that because it unifies your experience as a viewer of my album, and gives more insight into who we are!
So take a good look at your album. Sit down with it and read your journaling. Is there a story you could develop further? If not, that’s okay. I’ll post more about this next week.
And that leads you to the next step…
Step 4. Identify What’s Missing and/or What Should Be Moved
When you look through your album make a note of anything you’ve left out:
- journaling on some of the pages
- relevant parts of the story that you realize your scrapbook isn’t showing
- photos you want to include in that album
- ephemera that should be a part of the album
I usually find at least one or two pages that will be better at telling a different story in a different album.
Now we’re ready for the next step…
Make a Plan: the remaining scrapbook pages to complete.
You should now have a list of the empty backs of pages you need to fill. You should also have a list of what’s missing in your album. Now match them up.
For example, one story I found missing from my scrapbook is how we reclaimed our home by turning our garage into a studio so we can shoot our videos and the Roundtable in there, instead of in our living room and bedroom. The number of pictures I wanted to use for that works well with one of my empty pocketed page protectors.
I completed that page yesterday…
Make a Scrapbook Layout and Share It!
Ready to get going? After doing any steps above that make sense for your album, choose which layout you want to start with and make a page!
If you post your layouts somewhere online, please link us up to it by leaving a comment!
Paperclipping Members: If you want additional ideas and inspiration, you can watch episodes 175 and 176, where I shared this entire process (and more!) for a scrapbook about the personality of my family.
For next week’s member video tutorial I’m going to take you on a tour through my Everyday Life album so you can see more of the problems, more of the “uglies,” and see my solutions for it. You’ll see this album — which currently looks like a jumbled and confusing mess — come together as a more cohesive story that flows.
Not a member? Click here for info so you get a fuller experience as you play along this month!
To move forward in the Play Along: Finish An Album, click here: Complete an Everyday Life Scrapbook.
