Photo Freedom by Stacey Julian

 

I first read this book about 3 years ago, and immediately knew this was the system that would work for me!  I had 3 decades of old ‘sticky’ photo albums, the photos quite nicely presented, but very little journaling!  Right from when I started scrapbooking I knew I wanted to go back and redo these albums.   I especially love Stacey’s Library of Memories, and have set this up for myself for the older photos.

This year, Stacey has tweaked her Library of Memories class and changed it’s name to Finding Photo Freedom.  I think she will concentrate more on keeping tabs on those thousands of digital photos we take nowadays!  My Nikon has recently taken it’s 10,000th photo!  I am in the happy state of having most of my old film photos well sorted. They are either in storage binders or my category box (a 12 x 12 Creative Memories power sorter).

So my pre class preparation has been to spend time with my digital photos!  I use Windows Live Photo gallery to organise my photos.  This enables me to tag and rate my photos.  The vast majority have been tagged correctly, but I have not rated very many.  So I have been going through them, by tag at first, and deleting the rubbish, and giving 1 star to any decent photos.  My thoughts were then to go through these and give the best 2 stars, then 3 stars and so on.  But I might skip straight to 5 stars, we’ll see!

Regarding albums, I have albums called Us, People we love, Places and Things. So as I scrap the kids when they were little (which is something I have been doing lately in LOAD), they can go into 'Us'. As the albums fill up, I think I will split them into Nicholas and Lucy and then into decades.

The other scrapbook I like to keep is a yearly album, as per Shimelle's 'Document 2010' class last year. I do 2 12 x 12 pages plus a divided page protector for each month. So I do print out photos each month for this album. I don't know if I will print any other older photos out - maybe for projects from time to time.

Other than that I have projects, such as Home, 52 walks, an album about me. These 3 are nearly finished, but have taken a very long time! My next ongoing project will be holidays. None of our holiday photos are within my LOM system, They are all in divided page protectors in 12 x 12 albums. One day () I plan to scrap a couple of pages per holiday leaving most of the photos in their divided page protectors and incorporate the diaries I have kept and memorabelia into these albums.
Other arty things such as stamping, painting, embossing etc, I find I do not do very often. I would rather be scrapbooking and memory keeping!

What I really need to do is seriously pare down on my stash, and be ruthless. It is so hard though isn't it? I might need that 1" square bit of paper - it might be just the thing to embellish my current page! Yesterday I put all my scraps back into their drawers. It doesn't seem so bad when they are out of sight.  I feel like I might be nearly ready to give up stamping too!  Maybe just keep a few little stamps for scrapbooking, I so rarely use all my stamps now.