NSD Re-cap

Wow! What a weekend! As I said before, I went to my LSS to crop in celebration of National Scrapbook Day! 30 hours of cropping altogether! Of course there was talking and eating involved as well!

I went with a friend and we sat at a table where we didn't know any of the other croppers. By the end of the weekend, we had 6 new, amazing scrapbooking friends!

I wanted to share something that I learned this weekend (and they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks). I love the idea of sketch layouts - I love it so much that I teach a class each month using sketches! Well, this one lady at our table was just pumping out page layouts, one right after another. What really caught my eye, was that she had all different sizes of pictures on her layouts: landscape, 2 x 2, etc. All she did was look in this little notebook of hers, layout her page and slap down some pictures and she was done! voila! I was intrigued...so I asked. She was in fact using sketches to make her layouts, but instead of just developing her film in the standard 4 x 6 print, she did a little homework before hand. She would pick the sketch that best fit the amount of pictures she had for her layout and put it in her little notebook. Then she would decide what size each picture in the layout had to be. She then would go to her computer and crop or enlarge her pictures to the size she needed and then send them online to Costco for developing. (I use Sam's Club, but you can develop pics using whatever method is good for you) She would then decide what paper, embellishments, ribbons, etc she would be using for that particular layout and put them all in a sleeve. When she picked up the pics, she would also put them into the sleeve with the paper and stuff. When she goes cropping, she brings the "kits" that she's made and sits and makes one at a time. As she finishes them, she checks them off in her little notebook. She says it takes a little bit of time in the beginning, but it really saves time when she goes scrapbooking.

Well needless to say, I bought a sketch notebook today and will be adapting this method to help me get some pages done!

I'll keep you posted on my progress with this little organizational tidbit!