Scrapbooking Big Events: Three Tips for Starting a Layout or Album

This is a guest post by team member Jess Forster.

When I became pregnant with my daughter Rowan in 2011, I knew that I wanted to document my journey to motherhood. Having a child is an incredibly momentous occasion and I wanted to create an album that reflected that ride. A year and a half later, I have 58 pocket pages and 12 layouts completed and a whole album worth of material to look back at and wonder, where did the time go? Whether you are having a baby, going on a life changing vacation or getting married, here are four tips to help you begin documenting big event layouts or albums.

1. Start with the end in mind. Big events often represent a significant times in our lives. As scrapbookers, we put pressure on ourselves to make the “perfect page” especially when it comes to meaningful occasions. This way of thinking can be totally overwhelming and a buzz kill when it comes to sitting down and creating a layout. When I started my pregnancy album, I realized I couldn’t document everything, so I asked myself, what were the three most important things I wanted to include in my album. I realized wanted to have my pictures of my growing belly, monthly updates about the baby’s progress and snapshots of our life as a couple preparing for a little one. This gave me a blueprint for creating my album and helped guide my creative process.

2. Make copies of all originals. Whether it’s your grandparents wedding photo from 50 years ago or an airplane ticket from your trip to Europe, storing your memories digitally, and in multiple locations, can help ease the pressure of scrapbooking a big event. Chances are you will have much more fun cutting up a picture of your childhood knowing that it isn’t the original or the only copy. In terms of memorabilia, try scanning it or taking a photo of the item and include it in your layout. For my pregnancy album I have all my monthly belly pictures on my laptop, as well as an external hard drive, on my blog and on facebook. It might be overkill, but I will never forgot / lose the evidence of how big I actually got.

Credits

3. Rely on good design. With so many decisions to make about what pictures to use and what to details to include in your journaling, why not look to the experts to help guide you. Knowing that I that I didn’t have a lot of time to complete this album, I decided to limit my supplies. In addition to using a specific color scheme through out my entire album, I also relied heavily on templates to guide my scrapping process. There are so many to choose from including the ones that you can find in the Simple Scrapper membership. A year a have later, I still love that I used a Sepetmber 2011 Simple Scrapper template five times in my album!

4. When in doubt, have fun! Don’t forget that the non scrapbookers of the world don’t care if you used old Amy Tangerine products or non archival ink on your page. When you hear your inner critic, take a break and remember it doesn’t have to be so complicated! I still need to scrap Rowan’s birth story but haven’t been inspired. I don’t feel guilty about this because I know I will get to it some day. I look forward to the moment I create that layout and will wait until I am in the right frame of mind.

Editor’s Note: We all have a few big event projects on the backburner. Leave a comment and share one project you’d like to tackle this year.

Learn a step-by-step approach for tackling big projects in this month’s Focus lesson, available with your new premium membership.