SingleScrapbooker

Boxes of Old Photos

2009-02-22T15:20:00.000-08:00

My mother, who has Alzheimer’s, enjoys scrapbooking, although she hasn’t done much lately. During her last visit to her geriatric psychiatrist, he encouraged her to spend more time scrapbooking, which makes perfect sense to me. In light of that, I’m glad I began to help her organize her work area.

What I’m thinking about now is all of Mum’s old photos that I found in the basement, neatly piled in old boxes but unlabeled. Going through them with her will be time consuming and tedious – but potentially an excellent opportunity to connect with Mum (and Dad too) and more importantly, to stimulate her long term memory. First I must get them into photo safe storage. I’m considering Creative Memories Power Sort Box. I don’t have one of these, but a friend does. The storage I have is from Michael’s and doesn’t have the removable sections that the Creative Memories’ product does.

Reviving this Blog

2009-01-18T07:41:00.000-08:00

Much has changed since I put this blog on hiatus. I'm truly glad I didn't entirely shut it down, although I often wondered why I didn't.

2008 was an extremely challenging year for me. I made a life decision to return to New England, where my entire family lives. By God's grace, I was offered the only job I applied for out here, with an excellent salary and generous relocation benefit. This just as the economy turned majorly sour. I do not believe this would have happened a month later than it did.

There have been numerous challenges to be sure, but this was absolutely the right thing. I love New England and feel at home here while still suffering from loneliness and missing my friends and favorite places in California. One event that has underscored the rightness of this move is my mother's diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease two days after I arrived here for good. I write on this in a dedicated blog, Fade to Memory.

One reason I'm reviving this blog is that I now believe I have a real and meaningful reason to scrapbook. Once a month I'll be visiting my mother to help her with sorting through and labeling her photos while she still remembers their details. We'll organize and scrapbook them too, although that part isn't yet clear to me. This will be my main project and I feel good about it.

For me, scrapbooking as a single person has brought about the struggle of finding meaning. The great majority of scrapbookers are married and/or mothers. I am neither. I love to take photos and scrapbook them, but who really cares about my products? Yes, some people enjoy looking at them. But I don't truly believe that they will be terribly meaningful to anyone after I'm gone from this earth. So, I'm on this slow journey to finding meaning for me in this activity I love so much. Slowly, because I have little time scrapbook and in fact have not done so for a year. The last time I scrapbooked was a year ago tomorrow.

I'm doing this project with my mother for her and the rest of my family as well as myself. I admit that and am fine with it. The joy of giving will now be a big part of scrapbooking for me.

No More Posts

2008-03-12T22:37:00.000-07:00

The last time I scrapbooked was mid-January, before I started my new job. That day, I returned home, didn't even have time to put my stuff away, and went about my business. The stuff is still there, 2 months later. I see no time in the foreseeable future to scrapbook or even do anything where I would take any photographs. My job is taking up all my bandwidth, a discouraging situation seeing as I don't like it and I'm in a financial bind because of the relatively low pay. So being in the worst of both worlds, no money and no time, I have to reluctantly conclude that scrapbooking will not be a part of my near future. At some point, I may reevaluate, but for now, I'm signing off as I see no point in posting when I have no time to scrapbook or even think about it.

New Photo Printer

2008-01-05T12:37:00.000-08:00

I'm so excited! My new photo printer - HP A626 Compact PhotoSmart - has arrived. So cute (read: small), and with its own carrying case that is about the size of my purse. My scrapping area is far removed from my computer, so my plan is to set the printer up in the dining room, where I scrap. I can print out photos directly from my photo card, and the handy display will allow me to view them first. I'll still order prints from Kodak Gallery, but now I don't have to wait for the most important photos if I don't want to.

Next week I've set aside a day or two to set up the printer and organize my materials that are now a jumbled mess in my closet. I can hardly wait!

Creativity and Mental Clutter

2007-12-26T11:24:00.000-08:00

I read somewhere that one sign of creativity is the tolerance for clutter. The statement referred to physical clutter, but I believe that also extends to mental clutter, the unrealized ideas and dreams we have and the thought and reasoning that brings them about. This tolerance helps clear the mind’s pathways for the execution of creative actions, tasks, and projects.

I do not suffer from a lack of creativity, as I once thought I did. But because I work fairly equally from my right and left brain, I torture myself with the belief that my clutter can be organized. It can, to an extent. A small extent, I am finding. I need to let go of my belief and face the truth.

What better time than now?

I lost my job a couple of months ago. Along with all the normal anxieties and grief, I also felt relief. Wow, I thought, I’ll have time to organize my life. Not.

My rich and full life did not stop because my job did. In fact, it became even more full. Trying to totally organize it is like trying to boil the ocean, to use a tired analogy. I’m not only not succeeding in boiling it, but beginning anew each day at this impossible and pointless task. A stupid project for such a smart person, and one that keeps me from moving forward.

I could go on and on about setting limits and boundaries, making choices and living with them, accepting what is. All of that is important.

It all comes down to boiling enough water for my cup of tea in the morning. That’s living. The rest of the water stays where it is, doing what it does, creating waves and weather and providing life for the planet. I can look out on it and know it can’t be boiled. Whew. Big breath in and out.

Palette Perspective

2007-08-06T20:21:00.000-07:00

Since I'm so fascinated by color, I recently bought a few books on color – Color Index by Krause, Living Colors by Walsh & Hope, and Interaction of Color by Albers. So far I've only flipped through them, but they still got me thinking.

I find myself observing palettes now in just about everything – my dining room carpet, the grungy beach towel that protects my desk from kitty barf, a Kleenex box, a church brochure. Do the colors go well together? Why or why not? Do they work for their purpose? How would that same palette work for another purpose? Do the colors have meaning or enhance meaning?

I haven't really thought of my scrapbooking pages in terms of palettes very much but it's something to try. Since I'm hooked into color more than design, perhaps the palette perspective will help to improve my pages, and perhaps my designs. I find working with layout design somewhat tedious, but working at from a color palette perspective could add interest for me. Can’t wait to try it and see.

Photo Uploading, Selection, and Storage Process

2007-07-25T06:51:00.000-07:00

I take many more photos than I can ever scrapbook. Besides the duplicates, similar ones, and those that aren't very good, there are great ones that may not make the cut. I've begun following a process with my photos after a trip or a photo session.

1. Before uploading my photos, I take a quick look while they're still in the camera to see if there are any obvious bloopers or duplicates and delete those right away. I also get an idea of what I'm dealing with – 50 photos or 500? How many different subjects? This gets ideas flowing.

2. Upload the photos to my local drive.

3. I don't usually want to share and print out all my photos, so next I select those I want to share and want prints of – sometimes I have to copy and separate them out to make things easier. Later I delete the copies to save space.

4. Upload to Kodak Gallery.

5. Create albums in KG to share.

6. Order prints.

7. Back to the local drive. If I've made copies, delete them. Separate originals into directories if necessary. Backup all originals to a CD.

8. When I receive the prints a few days later, select the ones I want to scrapbook. Put the rest in an attractive photo safe album – I like the ones with the plastic sleeves that provide room for writing. Label them.

9. Label the ones I selected for scrapbooking, just in case I can't get to them before I forget details. Put them in my photo box for safekeeping.

Self-Timed Photos

2007-07-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago my sister and brother-in-law visited me. We did some sightseeing in the Marin Headlands, Golden Gate Park, and Big Sur. I took some great photos that I look forward to scrapbooking. It wasn't hard taking good photos because these areas are so incredibly diverse and visually interesting, and there were three of us to take shots of each other.

At the moment, I am at my family's summer place on a lake in New Hampshire. I come here every year, and I love this place. It's very different from California. Being here alone, I often face the challenge of documenting my visit using photography in more creative ways.

The day I arrived here was beautiful, sunny and warm, just about perfect. I struggled with a way to express this other than just taking the usual shot of the lake and mountains – lovely, but basically the same since I was a child.

Finally I remembered the self-timer on my camera. I positioned the camera to get a shot of me laying on the deck with the water in the background, set the timer, scooted into my pose, and voila! A perfect shot. I used the feature again to get a shot of me reading a book after the weather turned rainy.

I'll be thinking of other ways to use this feature during this trip and incorporate it into my bag of tricks. Yes, my layouts of my vacations alone can include more photos of me. This will be the Year of the Self-Timer.

Disappointing

2007-06-03T17:58:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I took a business trip to Minneapolis. While it's not a destination that's ever been on my Top 10 list, I was sure I could find something interesting to see. And I did, actually more than I had time to get to. I did get to the Sculpture Garden and the Mississippi river walk to view the Stone Arch bridge, and I visited the fantabulous new Minneapolis Public Library. What I really, really wanted to see turned out to be the easiest to get to - the Mary Tyler Moore statue at 7th and Nicolette Mall. Being a huge fan of the Mary Tyler Moore Show that ran from 1970-1976, I actually felt emotional when I saw it. After all, Mary Richards (MTM's character) was my role model.

Unfortunately, I got no pictures of it because my camera wouldn't start up, and I wasn't able to find any postcards of it. Yes, I know there were other options - throw-away cameras or have someone else take the picture, but I didn't work really hard to taking those options.

This is the first trip I've been on in quite a while during which I took no photos. I didn't think it would bother me so much, but now I do feel as I missed an important dimension of the trip. Yes, I moved more quickly, but I still found myself thinking what would make a good photos for my scrapbook.

Even though I've had zero time to scrapbook lately and I still have photos to upload and organize and even more to scrapbook, I'll remember the next time this happens that taking photos is very important to me. I'll find a way to get them because now I realize how much having them means to me, and how looking at them brings back the memories so clearly.

Martha Stewart's Scrapbooking Products

2007-05-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

I wasn’t a Martha Stewart fan until recently. In fact, I didn’t realize I was a fan at all until I opened up the Michael’s circular and saw an insert devoted to Martha Stewart Crafts. It’s not just scrapbooking, but other paper crafts as well. The scrapbooking materials were nothing real unusual, just nice-looking. I have to admit I’m getting tired of all the new things out there – it just seems wacky and faddish sometimes. Anyway, Martha’s markers and stamps particularly caught my eye.

I like that Martha stands for the common people’s brands, like K-Mart and Michael’s. She certainly has the clout to develop her own high-end lines of home and craft products. I've bought stuff from her product lines at KMart and have been happy with the style and quality.

Looking forward to going to Michael’s and seeing these things for real. The last time I was there, a week or two before I received this circular, there was practically no scrapbooking product on the shelves. I hoped they were restocking, and maybe they were preparing for Martha’s stuff.

Social & Solitary Scrapbooking

2007-05-07T20:51:00.000-07:00

Got a few pages done at this past weekend’s National Scrapbook Day celebration. It was great to see what others are doing too. Julie, my CM consultant, is also working older snapshots. I like seeing what she is doing with them.

As much as I enjoy getting together with others to scrapbook, I find I don’t get as much done. I’m not one to chat and work at the same time. No problem – gives me a reason to balance out my social scrapbooking time with my solitary scrapbooking time.

Organization and Mindset

2007-04-22T16:13:00.000-07:00

My new place has a large linen closet, part of which I’m using to store most of my scrapbooking stuff. I’ve been dreading organizing it, because it is mess.

Today I realized it makes sense to organize the stuff for the project I’m working on – select it and keep what I’m working on out or in the cupboard in the kitchen closer to where I scrapbook. So I did just that.

My current project is a heritage album of my great aunt’s snapshots of the family’s summer home. I selected a limited number of materials to use for this project and put the rest away, thus making the closet even messier. That’s OK because my mind is clearer about what I’m doing with this project. I have some great paper I’ll be using to add variety to the pages, rather than having everything just black and white and sepia. Muted colors, some old-fashioned patterned paper, a few stickers.

There’s still a lot of work to do on the project. I feel like I’ve been organizing these photos since forever, and in fact it has been years. It’s very important to me to let them tell their story in a compelling way. The usual way of organizing them, by year, was taken away when someone dropped the box that the photos were in. My aunt had them filed by year with index tabs, but not labeled. After some quite a bit of examination, I realized the photos were no longer in order and not necessarily in the right sections. Perhaps this will ultimately be a good thing, as grouping them differently could be much more interesting. It is hard to date some of them however.

Bringing this project to National Scrapbook Day now seems like a good idea – I was previously against bringing it anywhere. Also, I’m much more excited about the project because I’m including different paper and embellishments. It’s amazing how some thought and organization can change a mindset and improve attitude.

Color in Heritage Albums

2007-04-16T21:53:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been scrapping my great aunt's snapshots from the 1920-1940's. I found myself telling someone that the interesting part was organizing them for the layout; the scrapping part was boring. Basically I'm using black pages, clear corners, and a few heritage stickers. After I said that, I found myself thinking, why not use a bit of color here and there? So what if all the photos are black and white?

There's a shot of my great aunt and her friend merrily coasting downhill together in a wagon, the kind kids use for towing stuff around (or did, in my childhood). They look so happy. That picuture speaks loud and clear of color - bright red or yellow. Why not? It doesn't have to be overpowering. I think the use of color here would enhance the photo and its story.

Gimme Five

2007-04-10T20:41:00.000-07:00

A simple but practical article in my favorite scrapbooking magazine, Simple Scrapbooks gives me a new way to approach my pages. “Gimme Five!” by Margaret Scarbrough in the May/June 2007 issue suggests making pages with just five products. She shows five layouts that five different people created with this approach.

I love the idea and plan to try it myself soon. I often feel overwhelmed with the plethora of products I have and can get way too absorbed in selecting materials. It’s occurred to me that having no limit is a problem. A self-imposed limit of five items seems doable.

I did notice that cutting tools did not seem to be considered a “product” in this case. Products consisted mainly of letters, one piece of paper (that some people used only part of), and embellishments. However, one person used a sewing machine, which was considered a product but the thread used to stitch the paper was not considered a product. OK, now I’m getting anal;) - I can make up my own rules! Thanks, Simple Scrapbooks, for the great idea.

I'm Back

2007-04-10T20:39:00.000-07:00

It’s been so long since I’ve made an entry, I’m almost too embarrassed to start up again! Seriously, there have been many other activities demanding my attention, and I simply got out of the groove of blogging. This entry signals my intent to blog regularly once again. Here we go!

Considering Color

2006-11-26T16:30:00.000-08:00

Even though I don’t have time to scrapbook right now, I still find myself thinking about it at odd moments.

I’ve been intrigued with color for a while – what colors look well together and why. I learned a lot from the book “Color Harmony” although it’s not the most user friendly book on color out there. Now I actually articulate why some colors go together and others don’t.

Anyway, back to the odd moments. These days I tend to find myself eating alone in restaurants fairly frequently because of being in the middle of a move. Last night I sat at the bar at Applebee’s watching football while waiting for my food. I have zero interest in college football but what caught my eye was one team’s uniform colors. (USC I think.) Almost a mustardy yellow and a ketchup red, but both colors had more orange in them than actual mustard and ketchup colors. Against the bright green of the grass, the colors were quite striking. All bright colors, but the hues contrasted enough to make the combination pleasing.

Sometimes I wish I could custom color my own paper. I often page through my mountains of paper looking for just the right hue or shade and not finding it. That is where creativity in working with available materials enters in. Knowing when it’s time to stop the search and choose a contrasting or complementary color or shade, or just go with black or white. But hmm... custom color paper - I don't know how it would work, but it's something I would go for!

New Home with a Big Closet

2006-11-12T21:26:00.000-08:00

Both the blog and scrapbooking have taken a back seat to finding a new home and moving. I found the new home and am very excited about it. For the rest of the year, my spare time will be dominated by moving tasks.

My new place has a big walk-in closet near the living room that I think will be a perfect place to keep a lot of my scrapbooking materials. I can hardly wait to set it up!

A big post-move challenge will be organizing my materials. I’ve been in my current home for a year, and I was never really able to get organized. Maybe the space was not right, I don’t know, but things are more disorganized than ever. Looking forward to getting organized and to doing some scrapbooking.

Mixing Craft & Organization

2006-09-17T17:41:00.000-07:00

When did my scrapbooks become more about the craft and less about the organization? I think when I realized I was much better at the latter than the former. But as much as I crave working with the paper, pens, tools and embellishments, I want to get my photos in albums. It’s definitely time to try Jaye’s suggestion as mentioned in her comment to my Copy a Layout entry: “Making one really elaborate page can be very satisfying even if you create simpler pages for the rest of the event.”

Scrapbooking "Art" Photos

2006-09-09T21:53:00.000-07:00

Going through the 312 photos I took during my vacation, I noticed how much I’ve been getting into taking what I call art shots. The lake framed by close-up branches, the house from an unusual angle, an interesting droopy flower rather than a perfect bloom. Many of these photos came out very well, and I really like them. I plan to order prints. But what will I do with them? Guess I’ll scrapbook some of them, but there are quite a few. Perhaps I’ll start an album of just this type of shot, maybe around themes rather than occasions or places. Reflect on what that shot means to me.

Scrapbooking While on Vacation

2006-09-04T16:52:00.000-07:00

Before I left for my trip back East in July, I sent ahead some scrapping materials, mostly the big things like the album and some pages, along with stickers and letters and a couple of pens. I stuck a few other items into my luggage.

The project I chose was organizing and scrapping a couple hundred of my great aunt’s snapshots from the 1920’s and 1930’s. This was a good choice because it requires fewer materials (no trimmer - I don’t cut old photos, and I don’t use a lot of embellishments). It was also a project I knew my sister would enjoy working on with me, and we were actually in the location where the photos were taken. That provided inspiration and ideas.

As it turned out, we spent most of the time organizing. We review the photos, came up with themes, and grouped the photos accordingly. This was no small task. In the end I only actually scrapbooked a couple of pages, but that was OK.

A couple of unexpected obstacles I ran into were weather and space issues. While I was there, the weather was extremely hot and humid, affecting both motivation and materials. Humidity combined with heat tends to make me cranky and not prone to want to do detail work (read: lazy). The high humidity also makes paper and photos curl, and anything with any sort of glue extra sticky. There is not a lot of work surface space at our summer place that is truly suitable, and finding a spot that was clean, away from the elements, and well-lit was a challenge.

All in all, I learned much from the experience and consider it to be a success despite the small number of pages completed.

Discouragement

2006-08-25T20:31:00.000-07:00

I haven’t kept my commitment to scrapbook at least an hour a week; in fact I’ve come nowhere near it. An hour this month? Hardly. I miss it and I feel it slipping away. There are so many other things competing for my bandwidth – I’m preparing to give a talk at a professional (librarian) conference in October; because of that I’ve joined Toastmasters and so I prepare other speeches to give in those meetings. A friend and I are holding a garage sale at my place on Labor Day weekend. Gathering and tagging the stuff for that has been time consuming. I’m trying to develop more of a social life and have joined a couple of women’s groups for activity partners/friends, and dating services for, well, dates. Also I’ve decided I need to move and that is preoccupying my thoughts. A hundred other things. Not to mention how bone-tired I am when I arrive home from work. Getting much done during the week seems impossible.

I actually find myself trying NOT to think about scrapbooking, because I can’t even fit in the hour a week. When will I ever get to it? Maybe in the late fall? Winter?

Perhaps the best action I can take is to keep writing down my ideas. And to keep scrapbooking near the front of my mind so that I don’t completely lose track of it.

Time Flies Too Fast

2006-08-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

Wow, it’s been long since my last entry. I was busy preparing for vacation, on vacation, and then busy getting back into the swing of things.

My annual sojourn to New England (the Old Country) to visit relatives and stay at the family summer camp was wonderful, and I took hundreds of photos. I like to document every single day, no matter how eventful (or not) in order to savor the experiences later. So I made it a point to take at least one photo per day. I’m full of ideas about how to scrapbook them. Unfortunately, that time is way down the road, as I have other projects first. I made a commitment to spend at least 1 hr per week scrapbooking (including the blog). Hopefully some weeks way more than 1 hour. My definition of scrapbooking has expanded to include photo uploading and management, as well as materials organization. Both of which I must do a lot of before actually working on albums.

I took some scrapbooking materials with me on vacation, or rather sent them ahead. It was an experiment to see what I could do. I’m planning on focusing on the results in a later entry.

Progress!

2006-07-04T17:46:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend Jaye and I got together for a day of scrapbooking. Jaye made some beautiful pages of her friend’s wedding shower and fully documented her son’s broken arm incident (two full pages of journaling, plus photos!).

Me, I knew that my photos were sorely in need of organization. Jaye and I had discussed how I was going to do that, but I hadn’t actually done it yet. In fact, I haven’t finished, but I got a good start. My photos were spread across many boxes and piles, but now I’ve managed to corral them into: 1) a box for those that won’t be scrapbooked 2) a photo case for those that will or may be scrapbooked 3) photos in loose envelopes yet to go through 4)photos in albums that needs to be removed. This has been tedious work, and I still have plenty to go through. Plus I’m sure I’ll need another case for those photos I plan to scrapbook.

To relieve the tedium, I have some layouts I’m working on. I watched Jaye with envy as she made her pages! I can see why people give up before they start organizing their photos. It can be pretty overwhelming.

Kristen suggested I ask someone to help me. If I had kids, it would be great, and a nice project for them too. No family in the area either, but it’s an idea I can still give some thought to.

Help or no, I detect a change in my atttitude - being organized feels so much better and makes me feel more positive about my scrapbooking.

Copy a Layout

2006-06-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve been thinking about the many wonderful layouts I see in scrapbooking books and magazines. I often look through them to get ideas for my own pages. I may use an element or two of a layout, but I’ve never tried to copy one. Perhaps I would learn something by doing that. There will probably be adjustments to make, but that should add to my experience.

Visible Advances in Photography

2006-05-29T15:55:00.000-07:00

Working on a project that involves many old photos from the 60’s and 70’s, I see that most of these photos are poor quality. Even if they hadn’t been thrown into boxes and stored in an attic for years, they weren’t great to begin with. I think this has much to do with the quality of the cameras used. My family didn’t have much money when I was growing up, so our cameras tended to be inexpensive and probably not the best quality.

I’m amazed at the technological improvements over the past few decades. Even throw-away cameras take good pictures, as long as the photographer isn’t attempting something too different. Most digital cameras take great photos, and special features with lighting, focus, etc. are so much more accessible. It’s a joy taking photos and seeing the image immediately! This leads to so much more experimentation. If it doesn’t work, just delete the image. Good photos could easily be prize winners. Electronic and hard copies back each other up. This is certainly an exciting time to be a scrapbooker.