The Big Picture in my Honeysuckle Patch

Listening to my friend Korie discuss a book called “the big picture” by Stacy Julian, I marveled at the idea of eventually starting to scrapbook again AND get my photos organized. Right now they are in boxes -- not quite haphazard -- but close. I picked up Stacy’s book, “photofreedom,” which was written after “the big picture.” This is true in my life – backward – why not, makes life interesting and following direction almost impossible. In this book, Stacy had discussed her photos from London (mine were taken in 2005) and how she used seven photos to highlight her trip on a two page spread. She then put 120 photos into a photo-album scrapbook. WHAT – a photo sleeve album, how could I lower my self to just put photos into sleeves???? Well, as you might guess she did not "just put." She “scraped” it and I was immediately hooked.

I went in search of my London photos and then shopping to find several items in order to follow her template for organizing my photos: storage binders found at Aaron Brothers; photo albums found at both Aaron Brothers and Targets; and photo storage boxes found at Michaels. After loading my photos into the storage binders in the order I wanted to scrap them, the search for background paper began in my very large stash. I must absolutely love Basic Grey because I have tons of it. Grabbed my bestest Zutter cutter (this is an amazing cutter) and began making 4 x 6 background papers for the sleeves of the album.

I accomplished this scrapbooking task in one month. I used the photos, my stamps, ephemera, chipboard, images, and anything else I thought would enhance the story. I must admit, I have to do a little journaling but all in all it is done and I feel so good. I now have my Paris photos in their own storage binder.

This blog kind of stepped in the middle of getting to the Paris photos… oh well. I promised a friend at the recent crop I went to that I would highlight some of these photos on my blog and so all the entries this week will be from London. Enjoy my trip out of Honeysuckle Land into the one across the great pond, London.

You will notice that I used a number of vertical layouts. My only caution to you would to be careful when cutting the photos. One thing I learned from doing mosaic layouts, is think where you want the "cut" line to fall. In the middle of a face - maybe not. Best to first determine where to cut before just cutting the photo in half. Remember that there will also be a "separation point" in the sleeves. On the Goslings, after mounting the photo onto the two 4 x 6 pieces -- I then did my stamping making sure the two pages were butted up to one another completely. The Buckingham Palace photos utilized two facing pages also using some clip art on the outside of the sleeves. More photos tomorrow - with less verbiage!