Big Picture Scrapbooking

I've gone over the top crazy about Stacy Julian's books. I think she's absolutely brilliant.

I enjoyed Photo Freedom so much that I bought Big Picture Scrapbooking, and if I see her first book, Simple Scrapbooking, I'm going to buy that one too. I can't imagine why anyone out there with a family wouldn't want these books. You're taking gads of pictures of your kids and storing them away and feeling guilty about not scrapping in chronological order. Your pictures are in stacks of boxes that are overflowing, and you're so overwhelmed that you can't scrap a thing.

I seriously recommend that you Run, don't walk, to your nearest scrapbook store and buy Photo Freedom, and if you can afford to buy Big Picture Scrapbooking, get that one too. You'll fall in love with Stacy's method for organizing and scrapping. Yes, her technique actually allows you to be a better scrapper!! Trust me, you won't be disappointed!

I'm just about at the point where I'll be slipping my pictures from the 80's, 90's and 2000+ into storage binders. This is an exciting step because I'm going to weed out the good from the bad as I do so, and only store pictures I want to scrap someday. The others will go into storage drawers, which I haven't bought yet....but I'll get there.

Stacy would have me start from the beginning of time, but I think dealing with the last 3 decades is good for now. The 60's and 70's have waited this long, they can wait a bit longer. Besides, most of those pictures will have to be cut out of the albums because they're permanently adhered there. So much for preserving history...you should see how faded they are...I'll be unable to save a lot of them. On the other hand, the pics that I never did anything with but leave in boxes....they're just fine. So I'd like to personally thank the person that invented those crappy sticky albums that sucked the life out of my pictures!

I bought Stacy Julian's latest book, Photo Freedom, and I love it. At first, I thought I'd copy the pages that interested me and then pass it on. But now I doubt that I'll be giving it up anytime soon. I absorbed what I had read, and the more I thought about it, the more excited I got to do it. I pulled out ALL of my pictures and I'm going to sit down and sort them just the way she outlines in the book. This is going to take forever. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel because now I know what to do and how to do it.

I must have a gazillion bad pictures in those boxes. I keep them because I always knew I would go to hell for thowing someone's picture away, or worse yet....I'd put a curse on them. I mean, seriously, why do we keep bad pictures? Because we paid for them, and anything we pay for must be worth keeping? Nah. It's the devil.

I may be a bit busy for a while...I'll be at least ankle, if not knee deep in pictures.