Sorry to get off on a tangent…what I really want to know about is where you got those folders! :)

I really, really enjoyed last weeks episode of the Round Table. I was so excited to immediately try organizing using some of the methods talked about on the show. First of all, I want to thank Noell for mentioning her system of purging. Wow! Who would da thunk? Not scrapbooking supply hoarder I. I know I have more supplies than I can ever ever use. I know I am not in love with everything I own. Yes, many things I love are buried under things I don’t love. What an organizational awakening! I have now decided (I must be honest and add that I haven’t quite started sorting things yet) that I will only keep what I love and get rid of what I don’t. I love the idea of having a bin on my desk where I scrap to put things in that I want to give away. Super smart! I also want to mention that I too use the color bins that Stacy uses. I am for the most part a color gal. I do however forget what is in each color bin, and end up using more time sorting through the bin, than actually scrapbooking. This makes me sad. I think my problem is that I have too much stuff. It is definitely stifling my creativity. Does anyone else have that problem? I honestly haven’t purchased any scrapbooking supplies besides adhesive in over a year. Most of my stuff is at least 3 or more years old. I like to mix old and new like Noell does, but wishing it didn’t take so much time to find what I want to use. Plus, I really want to buy a few new items that I’ve seen links to on this sight. 
PS. Thank you, thank you for the awesome membership deal. I was once a non-schmow, then a schmow, and thankfully not a schmow no more :) 

You guys are great! I always learn so much. By the way, my husband sometimes listens to the shows with me. He says that he feels sorry for Izzy being around all that estrogen all the time. He says he needs to host an episode called “The Man Show”, where there are only male scrapbookers, who drink beer, and fart a lot. 

Oh, one more thing. I am totally going to sort my paper by pattern size. That is a super idea!

Amy B.

The real test came when I was done however. I’ve been staring at these two photos on my desk for a couple of weeks now–I wanted to use them with orange and cut part of this truly pretty orange paper with a graphic white pattern. But something was totally off and I was making no progress. I looked at them again tonight after the reorg, and decided they were actually “whimsical/fun” photos and pulled out a large white/orange dot pattern from that folder. There is no comparison, it works now–even though the oranges are basically the same! It just feels better. 

The one other tip (besides looking for the ah ha! papers in your stash) I can offer is that I realized that for me personally color is a huge part of how a paper makes me “feel” and that the colors in my piles are extremely similar in tone if not also in actual color.  But this was so much better for me than color alone because I often have found it hard to decide which color a pattern actually was…And often I found that organizing by mood/feel accounts much better for both sides of the paper in almost all cases.  Thanks so much, Noell!

PS of course, when my boyfriend asked what I was doing, and I said that was organizing my paper by how it makes me feel, he thought I was crazy. But when he saw how quickly I was done, I think even he was impressed. He is used to seeing me obsess over half-finished organizational schemes for much longer than this took!