So much time…

Hey there!  am so excited to be here this week blogging with you. We have “so much time and so little to do. Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it.” (Yes that’s a favorite quote from a favorite movie – do you know the movie?)

 

This week I’m going to talk about how I organize myself so I can maximize the time that I have allotted to scrapbooking. Life – ah life. Life is busy isn’t it?  I wend my way through my days with the help of lists. Recently, I downloaded this pretty little printable freebie and printed a bunch out to use as my daily to do list. I just stapled them together. Staying on task with my chore and errand list leaves me time at night to unwind– typically scrapbooking, reading, or watching TV.  So the first item in getting ready to scrapbook is really carving out the time.

Source: Erin Vale Design

  

I have found I work best if I organize myself and break my scrapbooking process down into little pieces. Hopefully, some nugget of my process will help you. As I go along please share how you organize yourself and any tips you might have that save time. Also please ask questions!

As an example of my scrapbooking process, I am going to walk you through how I prepare for a crop. I also use this method when I’m working on my monthly projects for design teams. It’s a great way to maximize the time I have and it makes for super productive crops.

Basically there are five steps to my process…

1. Stories and photos
2. Sketches and Inspiration
3. Journaling
4. Product
5. Putting it all together

DAY 1 - STORIES & PHOTOS

I keep a notepad by my desk with lists of funny things my kids have said and other stories that I’d like to preserve. This helps when I sit down to work with my photos. My photo process is a little chaotic – I should probably organize it a little better and use a tool. It works for me though.

 

I take all the photos off my camera and put them in a folder on my hard drive that is labeled with the month and year. I don’t really scrapbook chronologically, but I do seem to be able to remember what month and year we were doing something so this helps me find photos if I want to go back to them later. At the end of the month, I back up the photos to another hard drive and burn all of the photos to DVD.  After that process is complete, I go through that month’s worth photos and copy anything that I think I might scrap into a folder on my desktop for future editing. This way I always have a pile of photos set aside to work with.

When I am getting ready for a crop, I simply open this folder and start editing them. I usually shoot for around 20-30 layouts worth of photos. My quick process for editing color photos in Photoshop Elements is not glamorous, but it works for me. I usually defog (run an unsharp mask at 60,20, 0), then I use levels to adjust the brightness and contrast, sometimes I run a soft light layer at around 30%, and at the end I sharpen with unsharp mask at 85, 4,1.

I don’t convert to black and white often, mostly laziness on my part! When I had Photoshop CS, I relied heavily on a black and white action and the Pioneer Woman Action sets. I use some of the actions at Coffee Shop for Elements. I haven’t found a black and white action I love for Elements for free (if you have one please share!) Sometimes I convert to black and white using Jessica Sprague’s method.

After I’ve edited my photos, I make photo collages with some of them and others I print in a variety of sizes from 3x5 to 5x7. I’ve found that digital frame templates are a great way to get a grouping of photos quickly. For example, Photo Cluster No. 15 by Katie Pertiet which I used on the layout below.

 

materials:  patterned paper (Cosmo Cricket) + tickets (SEI) + felt (Freehand Scraps) +  digital element (Photo Cluster No. 15, Katie Pertiet, Designer Digitals) + journal spots (Heidi Swapp) + fabric

 

Then I print the photos out on my home printer or upload them to mpix.com for processing. Once the photos are ready, I write a number on the back of each photo or set of photos. This helps keep me organized at the crop.

That’s the beginning of my process. Tomorrow we’ll talk about sketching and I’ll give you some ideas of places to go to find inspiration for making your own sketches. I’ll also post an inspiring ad as a challenge!  Stay tuned.