I’m trying to organize my craft room. It’s a mess and one of the biggest messes is my scrapbooking and picture piles. I have Ziploc bags full of pictures, I once went through and sorted them all by age, occasion, things like that, but that was several years ago.
Now they are just a big pile of confusion. Most of my pictures for the last five or six years are digital so they are not contributing to the mess in the craft room but boy are they a mess on the computer. I needed to get those cleaned up. I went through every single picture file I had on the computer and got rid of the bad pictures, organized the others into folders for each year and then in that folder I put folders for occasions like Christmas and birthdays. I also made electronic copies of the ones I want to print out and put them in another file so that when I have time to scrapbook a page they are all neatly organized there for me.
Then I started on the hard copies of pictures. I don’t know why but it’s easy for me to delete a digital picture that I don’t like but almost impossible for me to throw away an actual picture. I figured I probably needed to get those pictures out of the plastic bags, that can’t be good for them so I had folders that close using manila folders that I had on hand. I labeled each with the year and on the back of the pictures I wrote a little note about something I remember from that day.
Now the folders are neatly in a bin on the shelf in the craft room. I put all the scrapbooking paper in another bin and the little doo dads that dress up the pages in another bin. Everything is together so that when I have time I can scrapbook them. I’m trying to make two scrapbooks that are close to identical, one for me to keep and one for Hailey to have when she leaves home. When I left home all the pictures were in my grandmother’s and mother’s photo albums, it wasn’t until my grandmother passed away that I had pictures of myself as a child. Now, thanks to digital cameras it’s easy and inexpensive to share all those pictures with your child.
I can’t wait to have time to scrapbook again. First I have to clear off the table in the craft room, this could take a while.