Ribbon Holder

I have struggled with how to store my ribbon and have used a few different systems. I've never been totally sold on any of them. I used to keep them in little rubbermaid bins with holes drilled on the top, but that took a ton of room and I wanted to be able to see them at a glance.

Currently, I have them on 2 dowels where I can see them, but it's a pain to replace.

Cropper Hopper has a cool ribbon holder that would let you keep your ribbon on display, but it's also quick and easy to change the ribbon out. I love it. Of course, I'm not sure I have room to put it anywhere in my room, but I love it anyway. And you could hang all sorts of cool things off of it!!

Organizing your Photos

I've talked to people who want to scrapbook, or who have started and feel completely overwhelmed every time they go to create because they're surrounded by pictures and don't know which ones to scrapbook, so I thought I'd share my system since I think it works well (for me anyway).

For each album (or series of albums), I have a photo box.

Right now, I have 5 series of albums:

Kayla
Eric
Nathalie
Family
Portraits

Since the portraits are generally 8x10, I don't actually have a box for them, I just scrapbook them as I replace them in the frames. But the other four have boxes.

The first three are pretty obvious. I have several albums for Kayla & Eric already and when I finish Nathalie's first year, I'll probably have two. I have layouts done for the family album, but I keep jumping around, so as soon as I finish Nathalie's first year, I'm going to work on finishing 2008 for my family album. In the family album, I do things like when we go camping or on a vacation, Easter, Christmas etc. I got tired of doing Christmas layouts for Kayla and for Eric and having to repeat a lot of it, so I decided family type events go into a separate album. Then I have one last album for all the portraits I've gotten done of the kids and of us. Any professional photo gets scrapbooked and put in that album (after I've changed the photo anyway). I started this because in theory if I stayed caught up in the kids albums, then I'd have to leave a space for their school photo or for their Christmas ones and that got too complicated. And then, what would I do with the picture of the kids together, so a separate album it is.

So, my photo process:

I get all my photos back and then I get organized. I have a pencil, elastics, pad of sticky notes and a bunch of bigger envelopes (I use extras from Hallmark that someone brought to a club meeting ages ago).

You can see that I hadn't ordered photos for awhile (I figured I was already behind, so why order more). Anyway, I write sorting groups on the sticky notes. The groups that I did this time were:

Kayla (to go in Kayla's album)
Eric (to go in Eric's album)
Nathalie (to go in Nathalie's album)
Family (to go in the Family album)
Then I also write the names of people I want to give photos to: my sister, cousin, mother, mother in law etc.

Then I place these stickies on the table and get ready to start sorting photos into groups.


And I start sorting the photos placing them into the large group categories.

For each group of photos that I'm giving away, I put that pile in an envelope (I often use the photo envelopes I get from Costco) and write the recipient's name on it and put them aside. This gets rid of a ton of the photos and leaves me generally with 4 main piles (Kayla, Eric, Nathalie & Family).

I take one pile at a time and divide it into layouts that I want to do with the photos. It's easiest to that now before I want to scrapbook. Then I put each pile into an envelope and label it. I'm fairly specific in my labeling system (but you just have to find what works for you). I like to scrapbook chronologically (since I'm so Type A and all that), so I scrapbook from birthday to birthday. In the top right of each envelope is a letter to represent the album (K for Kayla etc) and then the layout theme/idea. So, Kayla's birthday might be K - 8th birthday. Then at the bottom, I write the scrapbook year so I can group those together. Her 8th birthday would be in the 7-8 year (meaning from her 7th birthday to her 8th birthday; the year starts immediately after their previous birthday). For the family album, the year goes on the bottom. I also take this time to make any notes about the layout that I want to remember (ie: there is an 8x10 to go with this or a theme or possible title or the date).


Then I group all the layouts from one year and put an elastic around them and put them in the photo box.

When I go to scrapbook, I try to do a year for one kid at a time and then I'll move on to the next year or another kid or the family album (I have been mixing it up a bit lately so that I can scrapbook specific layouts for my paper pack club or my blog, but for the most part that's the way I do it). I will pull the whole year which is held together by an elastic and just start working through them as I feel motivated. Any photos that don't make it onto a layout, but that I still like go into an extra envelope and when I'm done scrapbooking their birthday, then I make a few collage pages with those extra photos.


I have found that if I can spend an hour or two organizing the photos when I get them, then I can scrapbook so much faster. If I had to look through all those photos I had in the first photo, then I think I'd never get anything done.

Wow. This is a super long post, but one I hope you find helpful!

The Dilemma of Unmounted Stamps

For years, I avoided unmounted stamps because I was scared of them. Not scared like a mouse just ran over my foot or like I heard a noise late at night when I'm alone, but scared like I didn't know how to deal with them. I didn't have a bunch of wood blocks to mount them and frankly, I didn't really like the look of homemade mounted stamps (I'm snobby about how stuff looks). Eventually some friends convinced me to get some and I used Tack It Over & Over on them and just used them to stick onto my blocks. That was OK, except, where do you store them? I stuck them to acetate and threw them in a box where I ignored them and rarely used them.

Then the clear stamps came out (OK, they were probably already out, but they became popular enough that I saw them) and I came up with a system of sticking them to acetate and throwing them in the drawers with my regular mounted stamps. While I was at it, I threw in the other unmounteds too. Then I proceeded to not really use them because they'd get buried in the bottom of the drawer.

Then one day at a stamp club meeting, my friend Toni showed us these DVD cases she had found and I was sold. I found a distributor who would sell to me and brought in a ton. That was several years ago and I'm still using the system. I love it. And my Brother Label Machine 1/4" labels fit perfectly along the spine of the DVD case. I titled them and organized them and they sat on a shelf above my work area.

Then I discovered Tim Holtz stamps and fell in love again. I put them in my DVD cases and soon my shelf was full. Originally, my Tim stamps were put in order with my other stamps and all mixed in. I found myself reaching for them most often though, since I'm often doing samples to show off stuff I sell and it's helpful when I can actually bring in the stamps in the samples. And it was like my Tim stamps got lost amongst the other stamps.

Finally, I had a brainwave and put all my Tim stamps together in order and my other stamps together. I wanted to be able to quickly differentiate my Tim stamps from my others, so I put little red dots on the cases. Sometimes, I'd get overwhelmed looking for a set I knew I had that I really liked. Then the lightbulb really went on and I labeled my favorite stamps with little blue dots. So now I have a great visual of my favorite and my Tim stamps amongst a great system of storing my unmounted stamps.

Here you can see how I've labeled them and you can see all the red and blue dots.

And here is a more wide angle shot of my whole shelf.

When I am not creative ... then I organize

It's organization time here. I haven't felt very creative and so when that happens I feel the need to organize stuff. I just redid the kids rooms and my house is in a bit of chaos and that is not helping my compulsive need to organize.

In my last order, I got in two organizational products that I thought I'd share. I have 2 of each for sale (unless I steal them for myself first which I'm trying hard not to do).

First is the Cropper Hopper 5 drawer organizer ($19). It is black and white and it could go anywhere in your house you need a decorative organizer. I might swap out a couple ugly small iris style organizers in my craft room for these or I was thinking that I might put one up in my bathroom to hold my make up in a nice neat organized fashion.

Second is the Kaisercraft Trinket Chest ($15). I have a couple of the Kaisercraft shelves and they're quite cool. You decorate them however you'd like and then they're a useful storage. I love my little shelves.

Let me know if you are interested in either of these.