Mix It Up!

As I was looking back at my blog entries from this past week, I realized that the layout I posted of the 2009 Pam’s Pals event was the last email of that series and that I never posted the first.  Sometimes I do stuff like that…post things out of order, crop things out of order, live my life out of order…. 

The first page of the series

I was at my most productive when I worked on my scrapbooks out of order.  Don’t get me wrong, there are times when working chronologically is an absolute must like when I did my son’s Philmont Trek with the Boy Scouts.  I knew I had to work on each page in order to make sure that there were no gaps or blank pages..   But unless I’m working on a specific event that has many of pages, I prefer to mix things up.

I generally tend to divide my scrapbook pages into categories depending on what album they are going into.  For instance, I have a category for each of my children, family events and holidays, and then one or more special categories like NASCAR or vacation, etc.  I’ll plan out two or three layouts for each category and work on them in an alternating fashion.  That way I can mix things up a bit and won’t get bored working on the same subjects all the time.

A layout from our 2007 cruise.  I finally finished this album this fall.

So that’s the way I like to scrapbook, but I don’t get to do that very often these days.  Way back in 2007, I stopped working on everything else in an attempt to get Steven’s Boy Scout albums finished.  He was working his way up to Eagle Scout, and I wanted to have those albums finished before he did.  I didn’t even come close…not even with me dedicating every single scrapbook hour to working on those albums.  By the time he achieved the rank of Eagle, I was so sick of working on Boy Scouts that I haven’t done a single Boy Scout page since!  I was also woefully behind on everything else!

So take a lesson from me, mix it up a bit.  Have some fun.  Don’t let scrapbooking become drudgery.  If you’re tired of working on one album, move on to work on another.  It will get finished eventually, and you’ll enjoy it a lot more!