I decided to do a mid-month update for my One Little Word project for this year. This week I've finished a project that's been in the works for at least five years. About five or six years ago, I took every photo we had out of the old albums (some in damaging magnetic albums) and sorted all of them by event or subject.We're talking hundreds and hundreds of photos. I have over 900 of them now in photo albums and the rest are sorted into boxes waiting for a scrapbook home.
When the sorting was done, I started a birthday album for Sarah, but got bogged down when I couldn't identify all the guests, and when I realized there weren't enough photos to scrap (or the photos were totally missing!) for some birthdays. (I'd like to know what happens to those missing photos. They remind me of socks that disappear down our laundry shoot. I know we had them, but they can't be found!) This scrapbook was exactly why I chose the word "finish" for this year.
So this week I finished about four layouts that just needed some journaling or a list of guests. I gave up on the lists since neither Sarah, her babysitter, nor I can identify everyone, and replaced that spot with a journaling spot, a decoration, or another photo. Then I completed several last layouts for the birthdays for which I had enough photos. I've left room in the album in case photos reappear, but for now, I have more than half her birthdays documented. As she got older, we no longer had big parties, and there seem to be few photos. Anyway, I was feeling pretty good about this project and went to my tag book to mark this project done. Imagine my surprise when I realized I never listed this as one of the projects I wanted to finish! What was I thinking?
I was too lazy to take the layouts out of the album, but thought I'd share a few of the pages here. The title page was done yesterday after I punched out some 2X2 squares of extra photos. It's interesting to me that my scrapbook style has stayed relatively consistent over the years--pretty linear and a good amount of white space.
The page on the right here was done as a Make & Take at CHA last July. I later ordered some of the Teresa Collins papers so it was easy to add the second page.