To Scrapbook or Not?
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Years ago, I was a scrapbooking queen. I spent every spare dollar on supplies. I drove miles to visit scrapbooking shops and to attend scrapbooking conferences.
This was all pre-internet, too!
As our family grew, I determined that I would make sure that every milestone of my children’s lives would be carefully documented within the pages of color coordinated scrapbooks. I was a dreamer.
Yes, yes, I was.
Fast forward ten years or so. The boys, ages 13, 10, 8, and 6, each have at least one album. The girls? None. Other things have taken precedence over my scrapbooking hobby.
However, I don’t want my girls to follow the typical pattern of “the baby doesn’t have a baby book.” So, I’m turning to you for advice and input.
What would you do?
As it’s been four years since I last cropped a photo, I’m a little “behind the times” in terms of products that are available and techniques that are being used.
One of my goals this year is to do something with our photos. I figure this project is a good one to figure out.
I don’t have time for cute or elaborate layouts. I have four years of photos stored digitally. The choices, as I see them, are
- do nothing
- do my best to physically cut and paste simple designs and get my girls’ albums complete
- create my albums online via Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly
- or ?????
Any suggestions?
If you had four years and two albums to document, what is the quickest and simplest way that you would approach it?
Oh, how many times have I heard the same story …. we are leading such busy lives, there isn’t time to scrapbook. Personally, I am doing lots of digital scrapbooking with the Storybook Creator Plus Software from Creative Memories, but another option is to contact a Personal Photo Organizer to do it for you. My website address is provided, but you can also go to the home page and since PPO in lots of parts of the country. I know this is a busy season of life, but the story of their life is something your children will treasure!
I love, love, love my Shutterfly albums! Baby #3’s baby album was created on Shutterfly and ever since then I have made a yearly 8×8 album for each kiddo and a yearly family album. Shutterfly is always having sales, free shipping, and every once in a while I snag a free album code 🙂
I too have a bunch of paper scrapbooking supplies waiting to be used…but I am now letting the kiddos use most of it for art projects 🙂
I’ve been very happy with Scrapblog.com. Much cuter than plain ol’ shutterfly books, cheaper than paper scrapbooking, and they take up WAY less shelf space.
Shutterfly. Shutterfly. Shutterfly. You will love them! We also had a surplus of pictures of our two year old, and I made two books in a week. I’m being smarter with my younger son and starting his first year book now 🙂 Kelli of the Enjoying the Small Things blog has info about her Shutterfly books under her Photo FAQ page, which is where we got our inspiration from. Good luck!
I scrap only Christmas photos (I decided early on to limit myself!) but would like to do something for my boys (aged 4.5 and 3) and girl (3 months) that isn’t too cutesy or time consuming. So this year I plan to pic one or two photos from each month of their lives and enlarge and mount them in a nice album, maybe with some journalling. That way it is something from me which shows them my favourite photos and hopefully they won’t inherit too much clutter from me when they leave home 🙂
I only ever managed to get one child’s first year documented with journalling and everything, and another child’s first year in pictures. After that? Notta! I really love those little books that you can get and Ill probably have to get around to those one of these days. I know that here you can save codes from diaper packages and get a book or two for free.
I, like you, had set a goal to document my children’s lives in scrapbooks. Not knowing how many children I would have, I tried to set what I thought were realistic goals so that oldest didn’t get albums while younger ones didn’t. I came up with a 1st year album and a school year album for each kid. Kid #1 the 1st year album was mostly done by the first birthday. Kid #2, I finished the “1st year” album when he was 5. Kid #3 is 3 years old and I have scrapped his first 3 months. What I did for #2, since there was so much time lapsed between that 1st year and the 5 year old that he was…I used some pictures of him from 15 months until 2.5 on one page, highlighting some of him doing some of his favorite things (to tell the story, so to speak) and then I had pictures of him at 3, 4, and 5 and I ended the book there. Not every moment is documented. I think that if the other kids have a scrapbook that the younger ones should, too. But, not every detail needs to be in there. Use the pictures to tell the story of their first year.
As far as my “school albums”, #1 is in 4th grade and I have only scrapped her 1st year of preschool. No other “school albums” for the other kids, but I do have files where I store pictures of them from activities or awards or other things. I know you didn’t ask about this, but since you home school, maybe make it a project that you work on with the older kids to create 1-2 pages that tell the story/highlights of that year for each of the kids. They can get involved with the scrapping and record keeping…one might put in a trip or a book or a show or cooking or whatever and the story that they each tell would be wonderful. For your younger kids you can make 1-2 pages to give a snapshot of what they were like at 3, for example.
Digital scrapbooking! You can make one page and print it multiple times for different kids. You could also make one layout and switch out the pictures easily for different kids. I like to keep my layouts super-simple: just slap down a piece of “paper” and the photos on top. I do make sure to meticulously label as that is one thing I regret about my childhood pictures.
There is a lot of stuff available for free although it takes a bit of time to hunt it down sometimes; spending a few dollars may be worth it.
Cons: there’s a bit of a learning curve; printing can get pricey.
If you are over the whole cute layout thing, I would go with Shutterfly, they make it super easy to put together a book. They have “storyboards” where you just drag the pic to a “page” then when you are done the computer designs your book in seconds! and if you don’t like how they are arranged you can change it with limited amount of clicks.
I LOVE my Creative Memories stuff. I have their digital package and it’s so much easier than traditional scrapping. I still don’t have as much time to do that as I’d like, but it’s much faster, especitally if you get the premade pages. I do a mix of premade and homemade. I also bought one of their Milestones albums for family since I take way more pics than I can put on a scrapbook page and I’d like to display them. It was easy but $$$$ so we only have one right now. One didn’t even fit a whole year of pictures for the 6 of us.