Scrapbook Album Preplanning: A Beginner Learns Lessons

Ah! Here comes the voice of total inexperience. Preplanning?! You've got to be kidding, right?!

This is ORGANIZEDScrapbooks. CEO posts lots of articles, stories, and links about how to approach and manage this craft in an organized fashion. One our moderators, Gingerbug, bless her heart, volunteers many valuable hours to leading discussions on the tenets of organizing and planning.

But, I want to SCRAP! I want to CREATE! I want to PLAY, and I want to be AN ARTIST! Artists aren't worried about organizing and planning. Are they?

My first real scrap project was a full fledged album. I had played with some digi stuff, but I hadn't done a traditional page one, much less put together an album.

I knew better, I really did. I'm a project manager by profession. I've been around the OrganizedHome network long enough to know there was more to it, but I jumped right in - full speed ahead.

Click the "read more" link below to read my lessons learned.

I had some vague ideas.

• The album would be for and about my son
• It would highlight family activities during his time away at school
• Sentiments would focus on success, achievement, education, & being there
• It would be 8x8

That was all the thought I gave it, and I went off to Michaels.

To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement.

I had the most fleeting project management thought, I should have thought this out a bit more.

I picked up an album. That was easy. 8x8. My son likes black. I wanted to be able to embellish it a bit - some sort of title.

Paper! I needed paper! It never occurred to me that I could use the cardstock inserts in the album itself. I guess you've seen that paper aisle at Michaels. Ha Ha. I hadn't.

Cool! They had "kits." I didn't know that. But, I'd no sooner do a scrap kit than I'd buy a quilt kit. I *like* the creative process of design and planning.

Uh oh - there's that word again: plan.

I found a tablet of textured cardstock in neutrals. The color tones seemed to go together, and I liked the idea of not subscribing to a color theme. That way, the pictures could speak to me - and I could make them speak to my son.

I also picked up some adhesive, a craft knife, and a paper cutter/trimmer. Yeah, I'd need tools, wouldn't I? I hadn't even thought that far ahead.

I came home and began going through pictures. That was easy. Everything is from the last 15 months, so they were all on my camera's memory card.

The next planning/organization step? I created a folder on my desktop and began copying pics from the memory card that I'd like to work with, touched up the ones that needed it, and began printing.

I had a couple of vague design ideas for certain pages, and I literally whipped those out. I dunno. 3? 5? layouts, and I was overwhelmed again.

I did not want to keep using the same page designs over and over. I was beginning to see the challenge in the smaller format. I couldn't use as many pics as I wanted, so I needed to be more selective.

I had to think out each pic. Which was the focal point? Which could be printed in a smaller size and not lose detail? Which could be cropped?

Uh oh. Now I am accumulating *stuff* and *ideas* that need *organizing* Imagine that! I was time crunched. I hadn't taken the basic tenets of project management into consideration - constraints of time, resources, and skill.

Forward motion stopped while I researched. Right here. Site content. Board threads. Heck, I'm such a newbie, I only knew a of couple of other scrapping sites.

No time to construct a scrapping organizer. Bad, Lisa. A folder would have to do. I picked up a photo box with dividers to sort prints, using simple post-it notes to label tabs.

I looked at the free printables, but I had NO IDEA how to use them, and no time to learn. At this point, if it wasn't intuitive, it wasn't happening. And, despite my undeserved reputation at OrganizedHome, organization is NOT intuitive to me - it is a constant struggle.

Somebody had posted a link to something called pagemaps. Cool! I had no clue such a thing existed. Go ahead, laugh, I did - with glee! I printed a set for 8x8 formats, and popped them into my folder. I moved forward with a few more layouts - as true to the pagemaps as I could make them. I was inspired by them as well - so I was able to get back into the design groove.

One layout at a time. Time was so much a factor, I was designing on the fly. But the seed was planted, and I was beginning to see how those planner pages could be used - pic selection, color decisions, page design, embellishment & technique ideas.

As the layouts began to accumulate, I needed to think about how they were presented in the album. I had been uploading them to a gallery, and I could futz around with order a bit.

The next challenge? There were WAY too many pictures. I was being selective, but I needed to take the *whole album* into consideration so that I would be able to hit each of the activities/events that I wanted to cover.

Just as I was about to panic, CEO posted a story about a planner from the SqueakyPage. The Design & Layout Guide helped me to not only visualize the album's presentation, but it helped me in the page theme selection. I was laying out the album in a chronological order, and I could *see* how much room I had, and where the holes were.

The Guide even helped in the design process. I had one layout that was pretty bold. I had already seen that I was going to have to use a complementary design in the page that would be facing it - whatever the pic and/or event. By *planning* the album layout, I could immediately identify the event and select the photo. The bold page defined the new page design, and that layout is probably one of the best in the whole album - driving home the fact that *planning* is a crucial step.

My challenge in the future? To maintain a balance between planning, organizing, and the creative process. I *know* me. I will have to leverage the lessons learned so that I use preplanning as a tool - without becoming so involved in the planning process that my design and production suffers. After all, it is about the art, and filling those albums with memories - not filling planners with ideas.