How to Pack for a Crop by Elizabeth Wiederspohn

How do you get ready for a scrapbooking crop? Do you pack your whole car up with supplies? Do you page plan? Do you get frustrated that you don't get as much done at a crop?

We are excited to have 2010 Craft Warehouse Design Team member Elizabeth Wiederspohn, here to share with us how she prepares for a scrapbooking crop. This girl is so organized! We can all learn a tip or two!

 Photo of basics bag

Getting ready for a crop is something that took me a really long time to wrap my mind around. The first couple of times I brought two rolling suitcases with a bag over my shoulder which was pretty much my entire scrapbooking supply collection just in case I needed something. This drove me crazy not because of the mass amounts of stuff I had to crawl through to find things but because when I got home, I had to reorganize everything put everything away and much like my filing it never got done. Plus I didn't get much done because I spent most my time trying to figure out what I was doing and where to find things.

So after a few of these times not knowing where anything is and spending most my time organizing my stuff at the crops instead of scrapbooking I created a system. This system allows me to scrapbook mass pages during a crop and have to put away very little when I come home.

First of all I pack my basics bag (see photo above). This bag has the basic pens, cutting board, scissors, adhesive, ribbon, and tons of letter stickers in it.

Then I pack a bag of all my favorite embellishments. My current bag is a Clinique giveaway. (On a long trip I might pack two of these bags.) When finished this bag stays packed on my desk for me to pull from at any time. Pulling embellishments from a small bag saves me tons of time on my layouts.



Then I start on my photos. I take my memory cards in once a month to get pictures printed. Immediately after getting them printed I place each event in a 2.5 gallon resealable bag.



Then I place them in a Ikea storage cube until I am ready to make page kits. Sometimes I will have an idea or a piece of paper that really fits these pages right away and I slip those ideas and products in the bags before I even start making page kits.



Next, when I run out of page kits or before a crop I do a mass taking over of my living room and layout all of the bags with photos in them.



I start in one corner and work my way down the lines filling each bag with an idea from a magazine or printed online.



Then after all the bags have ideas I match the ideas and pictures with patterned paper. Making sure to Look at the idea I have and determining if I could use scraps or if full sheets of paper are needed



Then lastly I add my basic solid paper to all the bags.



There is one more step but I rarely get to it and that is journaling. I try to journal on all my pages and journaling is one of the hardest things to do at the crop. So if I am very organized I will look through all my page kits and write down the subject of each kit in a small notebook. I slip the notebook in my purse and while waiting for appointments or during breaks at work I bring out the notebook and pre-journal for the page. then I bring the notebook with me to the crop and I will have both journaling and titles for the pages ready to go. Like I said rarely does this step get finished but I try and when I have this done, that is when I can complete 10-15 pages in one night.



So in all the only things in my page kits are photos, ideas from magazines or printed online, patterned paper, and solid paper. Now when I am ready to crop I grab a bag, some page kits, and my embellishment bag and I am ready to go.



On a short trip I can get away with just bringing my one bag and a cutting board. That is a big difference from the two rolling totes and and shoulder bags.