| Planning Layouts for Faster and More Efficient Scrapbooking |
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Simple Steps to Quicker Scrapbooking Regardless of Your Style: Pre-Planning |
Do you have trouble starting a page from scratch? Do you ever think of great ideas for a page, but then forget them by the time you sit down to do the layout? Do you wish you could scrap faster? Do you ever get a layout half-finished and then get hung up on a particular task that you’re not in the mood for at that time?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you might want to consider developing a system for planning layouts. Planning your pages can help you scrap faster and become more organized and efficient. If you’re interested in learning how to maximize your scrapbooking time, read on for some great tips from myself and other scrapbookers who have offered their insight on the About Scrapbooking Forum.
PRE-PLANNING
Before we get started on the in-depth planning, let’s go over some advice pertaining to events that you know you will want to scrapbook about. The following are simple pre-planning tips that could help prevent your future layouts from becoming unnecessarily challenging, and help you plan your pages more easily.
- Bring Your Camera: Marianne writes, “I think about what events or just plain times that are coming up and remember to bring my camera to take pictures.” This is a great reminder for all of us who have forgotten to take our camera to an important event. Just as important, remember to bring enough film/digital storage cards, extra camera batteries, your tripod, or any other materials you could need. Just this year, my camera battery died halfway through the day when I was at a theme park. I was kicking myself for not bringing a backup with me. I’m sure that we all have events in mind that are not documented with photos. Though we can still scrapbook about those special times, it’s a lot more difficult than it would be if we had photos to go with these memories.
- Shoot plenty of photos. You want to have plenty of photos, in order to better ensure that you will capture the moments that you really want, which aids in your ability to scrapbook more easily. There are far too many events for which I had taken only a few random photos. It really slows my scrapbooking down when I have to “stretch” a couple of photos into a complete layout. It is important to have enough photos to “tell the story”, and it is a good practice to take extra photos, just in case some of the essential shots don’t turn out the way that you wanted them to.
- Be sure to take photos of all the people who were at an event. That includes yourself, too! Hand that camera to someone else once in a while. Also, be sure to take enough photos of all of the important people in your life. Marianne says, “…I noticed fairly early on that I was scrapbooking my grandchildren and not taking any photos of my kids (now 27 and 23—grandkids belong to stepson). Consequently, I take more pictures of my kids, though it is harder to find those ‘cute’ photo ops.”
- Grab memorabilia at events to help you remember details when you’re journaling. Take it from Francine, who learned the hard way, “…I have photos from a trip to Japan that I want to scrap, but of course I have forgotten all the details, like place names…I always take all the silly tourist brochures now, so that I have all the info for when I am ready to scrap.”
- Jot down quick notes or “memory joggers” as soon as possible after an event, and immediately label photos with a minimum of the date and occasion if you won’t be able to scrap them for a while. These notes and labels will be useful when you do get around to scrapbooking the events.
PHOTO PLANNING
The real layout planning starts with your photos. Below are a few steps for this stage of planning:
- Sort through sets of photos, organizing them by date and occasion. You may also want to consider organizing some photos non-chronologically, if this makes sense for the photos in question. Francine says, “I am trying not to organize my photos simply chronologically, but also by categories at times, like Christmas photos from several years ago. That way, I’m not forced to remember all the specific details and can do a general layout like ‘My Family Loves Christmas’.”
- Choose enough, but not too many, photos for a layout. Set aside the ones you don’t want to use, and choose any that you would like to enlarge, shrink, or fix in some way (change to black and white, correct color, etc.). If you are dealing with digital photos, all of these steps can be completed before you even have the photos printed.
- Consider organizing all the photos for an entire album at once, especially when dealing with older photos. For example, I recently organized an entire year’s worth of photos and listed the layouts I wanted to create for that year. The list will be useful when I’m putting my completed pages in order later. This process also helped me remember to make layouts for special events that I didn’t have photos for, like the September 11th tragedy. I probably would have forgotten this if I hadn’t been planning the entire year of layouts and thinking about all of the things that happened that year.
- While organizing each set of photos, decide how many pages they will cover. Whether it will be a one- or two-page layout or will need to be covered in multiple pages can be determined as you sort.
- Make a note of any layout ideas that come to you while sorting photos. Vernell agrees, stating, “I tend to sort the pictures into how many I want in each layout and a general theme. Then I have a notebook that I put the number of pictures and general theme idea in—one per page.”
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