Back by popular demand, is this outstanding article by Craft Warehouse Alumni and Design Team Member, Elizabeth Wiederspohn! It is one of our top five blog articles and I know it will help get you organized as you prepare for this upcoming National Scrapbook Day!
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?
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.
