One Page at a Time
by Audrey Okaneko

It is so much fun creating scrapbooks that I think sometimes we can become overwhelmed about the finished product.

Although many of my scrapbooks appear to be complete, I know that I might find another picture that I want to add, so I never really consider my scrapbooks “done”. In addition, over the years folks have mailed me pictures. For example, some friends were going through their own photos and found a really cute photo of my daughter taken when she was 5 (she is now 16). They mailed it to me. I really wanted to add it to her scrapbook.

I’ve found the easiest way to work on a scrapbook is to work on just one page at a time, or a two page layout (side by side), not really thinking about the finished product.

Right now, I’m working on a scrapbook of my daughter’s trip to Washington D.C. She was there over spring break. We have all of the photos. And we have the album. Now, we just work on the album one page at a time. Last week we got some new supplies, so now we are looking at old pages seeing if any of these supplies would compliment pages already complete.

It’s fun to watch the progress of the album being created. We know we will have a full scrapbook. My daughter will be attending a 4 week summer program in Washington D.C. this summer, so we know we may add to the current album or we may start a 2^nd album. We’ll know when we get to that point.

If your album is a gift to someone else, then daily or weekly goals is the route to go. For example, if you are creating a 12 page scrapbook for a gift and the gift giving event is in 2 weeks, you know that you’ll need to create one page per day. Usually one page can be created in 30 minutes or less. If I have time to create two pages, I will. If I skip a day, then my gift will only be 11 pages, not 12. I know the recipient will still be happy. And I can always create additional pages in the future for the recipient to add to his/her scrapbook.

When you create your scrapbook one page at a time, you spend more time enjoying the page you are working on and less time stressing over a finished project.