How to Prepare for a Scrapbooking Crop by Design Team Memeber Elizabeth Wiederspohn

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.