Lessons

Lesson Info

Refining Your Process

Process based questions aa lot of time I get these two questions you're scrabbling takes too long or I get stuck along the way. I make it to a certain point and then it's like a dead stop. So one of my favorite topics to talk about is how to scrapbook more quickly. And so I have some some hints here there in your workbooks is well, we'll follow along, but I do have some suggestions on how to speed up your scrapbooking, so if it feels like he should measure time with that sun dial rather than your iphone or a timer, I do have some suggestions I've actually written lots of block posts and e books and things like that courses on speeding of scrapbooking so it's a big love for me because I love it so much and I don't want it to take forever so my ideas the the less time I can spin on the page it's not that I don't enjoy it, but it's the more stories I can tell because some people say, well, why would I want to do it more quickly? And for me, it's all about the stories I just have so much t...

o tell that I want to go through the pages more quickly, and I also should say there may be times where you really want to take your time especially if it's a if it's a really deep story to tell like we're talking about telling nine eleven stories that's not something I would do in scrapbook improv it feels almost disrespectful in a way to try to speed through that but there are lighter stories like I don't really like ice cream all that much that can be done in thirty minutes and to spend three days on it doesn't seem in keeping with the importance of this story so and then there are important stories that go really fast or there are times where you just want to play with the technique or the stamping your going color out in all the letters or spend more time because you enjoy the creative process thes air just tips that you can use when you want tio to speed up the process one suggested is to time your process not like we did in scrapbook improv but just to sit down like you would normally do to create a page and you're not trying to beat the clock at all but you're just timing each state of stage of the process so you say ok to me thirty minutes to choose the story it took me ten minutes to pick the photos it took me an hour and a half to pick the products whatever it might be time the design stage the the storytelling stage each stage so you know if it takes you two hours an hour and a half of that was designed then you know where you're getting stuck, you're getting stuck on design or conversely, could be oh, to me now and have to pick the product or to find the perfect brad or whatever it might be, then you have a good sense of where you can start trimming time because, you know, what's taking the most time with our new process, starting with a story it's going to help you along the way just because you have a theme for your page in mind before you sit down to start making those choices. When you look at the products, whether they come in kits or whether they come individually or whatever you can say, does this help tell the story yes or no? And if it doesn't, you can just move on that's also ties in with the imperfection that to give yourself permission that it's not going to be the perfect brad because it doesn't really exist. If it helps you tell your story, then it's perfect number two for, of course, is to remind yourself why what? Why you're doing this at all? And when you go back and read those mission statements that we spent some time creating and reviewing, then it can help you see that it's not about the paper it's, not about the ribbon that it's not necessarily even about the photo, but it's about that story. And when you have that story, then you've got the primary reason in mind, and you can move through the other choices more quickly and when you get stuck along the way, if you're you're at that product selection phase that takes you an hour and a half, you remind yourself of your mission statement you want it might have even want to print it out and put it above your scrap space or on your screen favor of your digital scrap occur and remind yourself I'm not doing this to pick the best possible design in the world. I'm doing this to tell the story about expires e limits yourself and that's when we we've talked about in terms of kids, but also it could be in terms of photos when we look at the whole world as a possibility, it becomes very difficult to make choices and there's been a lot of research about choice and I think it's the book by barry schwartz in search of happiness, or I'm not positive about that, but it's been proven in tests that when people have more options there, more dissatisfied with any particular choice because they are always questioning that there could have been a better choice, so if you have twenty. Pens to choose from and you choose one you're actually less satisfied with that choice because you feel like maybe one of the other ones could have been better. But if you only have to have a ball point or you have a felt tip and you pick the felt tip, you're pretty happy with your choice because you knew the ball point one work it's, more black and white, so if you limit yourself in terms of supplies or even in terms of time, or just limit the choices and say, ok, I'm only going to use what's on my table right now, then you can create something your creativity kind of kicks in it's just like scrapbook improv, and I end up loving my pages away more when I have fewer choices. Another choice, another tip? Describe it quickly and get those photos off your camera because when you're sitting there sitting down the scrapbook and you're going through five thousand photos and trying to figure out which one to print there really small cause around your cameron, how do I hook up the quarter? Can I email it's myself? There's a lot of time wasted there and that's why I love group book because they're off the camera there in my hands, I'm ready to go. And if there's not a photo that I want to use, we'll be talking about this later I could even move on to another story and save that story for another time or create a layout without a photo or leave space for the photo and we'll talk about more tips about that giving yourself permission as well. Again, permission to macon imperfecta page permission to tell this story versus that story because we can start rating our stories and say, well, I really should be telling the story of, you know how I met my husband, but what I really want to talk about today is how much I loved shopping at the mall and you feel like making the inferior choice they're all stories, they're all parts of you they're all things to share and you might know that someday I want to tell that story about my husband and me, but today I feel like telling this that's okay, give yourself permission. Give your pride itself permission to experiment to try things differently realize you might create a page you're not crazy about. Dunn is better than perfect in my mind and again we're talking about, you know, five dollars, worth of product, maybe on a page, some of it you could probably reuse if you needed to if you decided you hated the page, I bet we all have some so much stuff that we wouldn't miss it if we screwed up on a page and decided to throw it away and screwing up this meeting to me what it would mean that the story that came out wasn't what I wanted to tell and I might keep it and create create a new one, and sometimes I do toss layouts just because they're not they don't ring authentic to me if it's authentic, I'll keep it, but if it feels fake in some way, then I won't keep it in my scrapbook cause I really want my scrapbooks to be about my life. The true story this is where the beat the clock comes in, where I challenge people too time difficult time challenging earlier to time, different portions of your process this is would be where I say, get out the timer and see if you can speed it up so again, if it normally takes you thirty minutes to choose your photo, see if you can cut that in half into them and fifteen or even less if it takes you, um, forty five minutes to pick the supplies for your page, see if you can do it in half of that. I typically set the bar pretty high, like going for half of what you normally do because it's going to make you stretch if I say just try to cut a couple minutes off it's not going to make you do anything differently just make you do it faster so but if I say cut it in half it's really going to make you stretch and again some of this is going to be uncomfortable and that's okay? It can be uncomfortable and you could say I'll get used to it because I like the outcome or you could say it's uncomfortable and I don't like it and go back to what you were doing before they're nobody's going to make you make you do in a particular way we talked about keeping an ideas list this is so valuable because sometimes you have time to scrap book but you haven't really mentally prepared like suddenly you're your doctor's appointment canceled so you're like oh my gosh I've got two hours this afternoon I'm in a scrapbook you sit down you're like what am I going to talk about? But if you have that list of ideas you can read down those twenty story ideas pick one that just jumps out at you and go to town having those ideas at the ready so helpful I mean look at scrapbook and probably go into it with the list of seven ideas that I could scrap book and I don't even know what they mean yet but it's a place to start and often times that's all we needed that place to start also, make sure you're documenting your life. Make sure you're taking the photos, make sure you're writing down the notes so again, when you do have time to scrap book, you're ready to go, and I actually consider that part of scrapbooking writing down the notes, jotting down the conversations, taking the photos for me, that's all part of the process that occurs it's like pre scrapbooking, so when I'm ready to scrap book, I have someplace to go to immediately, and I don't have to waste time thinking about what's next, and having go to designs really helps us well, and we went through three that I like you might have other ones that you really enjoy and that's great, you can create a pinterest board if people aren't familiar with pinterest pinterest dot com it's like a digital bulletin board where you can pin or save images into a gallery for yourself or share with other people? I think pretty much everybody knows about pinterest now, but there might be some people haven't used it for scrap booking before it's really a fabulous way to see what you like because you could create a pay a gallery of all your favorite scrapbooking images from the web and take a look at him, say, kush, I really love bright colors. But when I look at my scrapbook is deaf, they're all muted, you know, earth tones and you might decide jason gonna try some new things or the reverse, or I pinned all single photo layouts, but I tend to enjoy creating multi photo spread, so then no wonder you can't find inspiration when you go to your pinches for her because they don't fit the type of pages you like to create. Um, scrapbooking and stages is something that that people during our layout a day challenge, which is that monthly challenge where people create a layout every day for the month. I hear a lot of times that this is really successful for them, so they get the prompt in the morning so they might wake up and read their email. And it says, today you're going to create a layout about your favorite teacher from school, and their first thought is typically who's my favorite teacher. Where am I gonna get the photo? Lovable? The brain starts spinning, but then it settles down. So if you give yourself permission to think about it over the course of the day, so maybe while you're driving toe work or getting your coffee in the morning you start thinking about who was my favorite teacher? I wonder what happened to her when you start re marie stories? Oh, I remember that time it was her birthday and we all brought him. We brought in a balloon or whatever it might be. So you start thinking and brainstorming about that story and then later on in a different stage, you actually pull photos and maybe you might have to go online or dig back through and find your class photo from third grade, but then you go on and create the story of a different point in time, or figure out which story in your mind about that person you're going to document, and then by the time we stand a scrapbook, you've got lots of ideas, you might have the photos ready, so you've been doing it through the course of the day you're folding laundry while you're thinking about you know what? What story you want to tell and it's it doesn't come all at once, and sometimes that can be easier because you've broken up good, broken it up into pieces. Getting organized is really key to because it's hard to find things if you don't know where they are, right s so sometimes people can over organize and they end up out organizing. Have you ever done this? You know, you put something. It doesn't have to be scrapbooking related. Could be your keys. You know, I put this someplace where I wouldn't lose it. Now I don't remember where it wass it's like you over organize yourself. So what I suggest about organizing is that you organize the way that you would naturally think of looking for it. So if I sit down to go can where would I look for a pair of, you know, the scissors that are there, the funny shapes deserves the paper shapers? Oh, I would put those with my cutting tools. So then that's where I'm going to store them. So I actually think about that process before I even look for them our or think about organizing them. And this is where it gets really interesting because everybody's brain processes differently. And we were talking about earlier about stacy julian. She loves color and she thinks in color. So she's creating a page and she's thinking I want something orange here. I'm thinking, I want something I want to brad here or I want a border here. I so I organized by type. If you look at my room, I've got a tall it's like a laundry arm or dresser kind of thing with really narrow doors and there's borders there's tags there's bling meaning the rhinestones and shiny things they're divided like that because I'm thinking I'm looking for bling where stacy would say I want something yellow I want something green it's just the matter of how you would look for it and sometimes we see pictures of what other people have done and it looks really cool and we try it and then we think I can't find anything this is taken me forever so really think about your own process and how you tend to look for things next is challenged and we've done some challenges here already and it's been really fun but uh there are other places that you can get challenges as well I have an app for the iphone unfortunately it's iphone on lee right now and if you go to lane loves dot com slash load app and that's for lay out a day load app you can download the free app to your iphone and it gives you a prompt every single day and they might be story related they might be product related you never really know what you're going to get but it's fun and a lot of people do that together and they know one of their friends in one part of the country's using it somebody's using it over here and then they'd share them with each other a lot of bloggers have have challenges to the load challenge the layout of day challenge of the challenge that I sponsor several times a year where we have different seems for the month and then also writers prompt if you really love this idea of story, there are tons of books and sites and and places where you can get lists, the props for journaling or block posts and you can use those for your scrapbooking as well. Okay, I got a real quick one for you, so I'm giving you a prompt right now you're going to just jot down in the next couple minutes in people who are online are welcome to do this in the chat area to boy was my face red that's your prompt and just see where it takes you see what it reminds you have don't overthink it, but just I challenge you to start writing down some ideas for story could be a lift. It could be a specific instance in time where you were mad or embarrassed or sunburned take that prompted any direction you want and we're going to hear what kind of stories people come up with and this is not supposed to be journaling ready for a scrapbook page this is supposed to be just top of mind a story that it brings to mind that you might might end up in your scrapbook you may after today never look at it again but start with boy was my face red what does it remind you of? What could you think that you might end up putting in a scrapbook page and I actually have a layout that I'm gonna be sharing with you later about boy was my face red it's hard to be embarassed me but this time you were going to hear the story of of my life line possibly in the striking because this is what I came up with this really super bad something is not embarrassing thing again oh no I can think down where we don't have a nice laugh and again it might be very literal or it could be ok that reminds red reminds me of when I played raggedy ann in the school play and I have these big red cheeks and whatever it could be anything it's just that starting place to get its stories you might otherwise never tell sounds like we have some good ones here thiss ones from paper princess and this adds even more meaning to their name but it's when I realized that was walking around the toilet paper stuck to my shoe who doesn't have that? Oh my god totally yesterday when I fell off the white bench at the I know that heather d is not taking with heather I was once doing pallotti's when you lie across backwards over this big bowl in some very ritzy resort for end of things and I rolled off and I just couldn't felt live in every house is very quiet yeah they keep coming and tanya d adding more to it ah horrid picture from six grave you can remember that class picture that you had sun bleached blond hair bright red face white jean jacket and white frame sunglasses found rock in the media I think I saw justin bieber wearing that poison ivy that's a bad one to oh yes like lots of good ones yeah more horrible sunburns from people whenever a guy's attractive my face turns red giveaway I think you're cute uh okay let's check in here. Jennifer what what did that bring up for you? Anything interesting? Yeah, I used to work in san francisco and and I came in commuted in on bart went to a meeting outside of the office walked around the city during my lunch did several things that I had my code on all day and at the end of the day after I've gone back to the office I gotta put my coat on to commute home and so what's in the hood of your coat and it was a sock that was static clinton all day around the city weapon nobody has told me hey, my name busters inc where he comes out of the room and you get the fucking exactly it's a code forty seven whatever way you need you're giggling already over there I went on an alaska cruise. I know well, right? Why with thirty of my other friends and they do a polar bear plunge where they actually take pieces of the iceberg and put him in the swimming pool and you go in and you go jump in the certificate, it says, I jumped in the polar bear plunge, so all my friends are lining up on the railing and we go to jump and they don't look like likely then, the next day online, I see myself a lot janet jackson function you don't know and put a little black bar over on that was really very from the cruz. Thank goodness. Ah, tracy, uh, just this last week was my kids open house and my son is a fourth grader, and in fourth grade they learned how to square dance and apparently they show off open house to have to square dance in front of everyone. Well, no one told me or I don't think anyone that the moms had to join the sun squared and so on, and so I'm sitting here like running around in circles, no idea what I'm doing is everyone staring it well, everybody, I'm sure it was just it was awful, but my son was equally embarrassed, so that was good there you go into funding moment. Cindy stuck I went a lot of different direction until the nieces story reminded me a dear friend of mine invited me to be present at the birth of her child and this was a huge thing for me my son was born c section so I had never been through labor like the cia maybe more than that and so and she wanted pictures of everything pictures about take pictures everything pictures, pictures and then when I left she says now put the best picture of the baby up on the internet so that now on facebook so everyone can see it so I picked the best picture of the beautiful baby not realizing that she was sort of exposed in the background and put it on her face but who's more embarrassing you make sure that america because it's perfectly fine I was mortified how I think that says a lot about your impetus see some people bill yeah, well wasn't me ha ha yeah you're still good friends read thinking of is a lot mine was kind of an embarrassing story from way back but elementary school I went to catholic school and wear uniforms and on the way home we had to walk by the public school and we saw his get tease for uniforms like that so what we started doing with wearing a change of clothes underneath their uniform and then we run to the back of the church change on and then walk them street so I did that every day and one day we actually got caught changing by the maintenance man the of the church. So, you know, here we are these like junior high kids half naked behind the church. Yeah, that was that is so not great. Same. I remember one time when my daughter was tiny and not that she doesn't come by her opinionated nature far from the tree. But, uh, we were somewhere and a woman took out a cigarette and lit it and my daughter goes home. Mom, look, that's such a filthy, disgusting happened. Nobody will have won this in the one eye scrapbook, but I gotta share because it's a creative life story. So the producer liz it and the cameraman came to my home in boston to shoot the promo for the class and cameraman decided that we needed to move the couch out of the way to get better light so he moves it over. And some of you who read my block may have heard this story underneath where the couch was there's cabbage patch like sour sour cabbage patch kids, rappers, there's, a pretzel there's like all this junk and my house is I mean, we actually do clean that house, but apparently we're not clear and I was like oh my gosh talk about imperfection I can either be mortified right now or I could just crack up and it was such a bonding moment elizabeth an ira just looking at it like welcome to my life way with super funny so any other quick comments we've got another little section here to go through what these air so fun I don't wantto don't want to miss out on him no way to say john fund of the chat room if you're not already on way do you want to get through those you yes yeah ok so photo based questions of first one that we get so much as I don't have photos so what I say is yeah first of all no problem that's not a problem at all you can borrow photos from other people s o a few it's a kid's event a school or a team event or something like that or a wedding that you know other people were taking photos borrow them from other people it's totally ok to have photos taken by other people in your albums it's actually great because you're getting that other perspective and often it allows us to actually be in the photos which is such a rarity when we're the ones behind the camera so much you can get him from the internet we talked a little bit about that going online to find photos that might accompany a story that that we want to tell but we don't personally have story photos of especially for our youth s oh that's a great and a great option and I've got some examples of that images as well it doesn't have to be a photo we talked about screen captures it could be an image of a book cover like I shared in that that um page about my daughter's name I've scrapped booked album covers when I did a did a page about theeighties and had deveaux on there so think beyond just the photo how else could I illustrate this story if I did if I couldn't have a photo to a company and also you can do pages with no photos at all you've seen several of mine like that so far and there's again permission to do that if it seems like the story stands on it on its own even if you might prefer to have a photo, why not tell the story any way? Who knows when you might come across the photo that the then you could go back and add but don't hold up on telling important stories just because you don't have a photo to go with with them. Also another technique I use quite frequently is using photos that match the time period but don't necessarily match the story and I've got examples of some of these so photos for the internet the prompt was road trip and anybody else have an old car that looks like this from their youth, and you've got to jump over the seats because we didn't have to wear seat belts, and there were no car seats, and we were in the way back anyway, this reminds me of the car that we had growing up it's, not the exact car, but I knew about what it looks like, and I knew about what year it was created. S o I just went online and did a google search on green station wagons from like, nineteen, seventy six, and then I picked one that looked like what I had in my memory, and my sister saw it the other day and she's like that didn't look like our car and like it looked like my car. I don't know what you were in, but that looks like the one in my memory. So anyway, works for me, and it brings me back to that time, it might as well be I would feel no differently about this page if it were actually the car, because it matches what I have in my memory also here's one where I found actually embellishments, I used the embellishments from that I searched online, so this page was about the room that my sister and I shared when we were little. So nineteen seventy something I don't know exactly what the year is there's a picture of little laney and little mindy they're on and I new had clearly in my mind what the print of our comforters and our wallpaper looked like and by gosh I went online googled like me on calico print night the sheets and pillowcases or something like that and I found it and it didn't take day that took about five or ten minutes and I found it and I printed out a photo of it and then I punched it with the circle punching used it for embellishments on the page and it was so funny because I'm staying with my sister and she's a big thrift store shopper and I got there and she had found the old sheet and was on the bed that I was staying on she had tracked it down she decided at a thrift store and had it for you know, with sophie and product today and put it on the it would have clashed with everything because obviously we had some bright colors going on here's one this was my face red was my face red story this is stanford university and I worked as a tour guide at stanford and I worked in the hoover tower we used to take people up in the elevator to the bell prop platform on the fourteenth floor fifteenth floor and we had keys teo run the elevator and it was also an office building for the hoover institute, which is a well known conservative think tank at stanford really famous people who work there milton friedman who's a famous economist I mean important people and we shared the elevator with them one day I get in the elevator tio start it up somehow I dropped the keys and they're on a key chain that I swears this big and I also promised that this happened the keys like moved on their own over to the crack in the elevator and fell down the elevator shaft so we're up on the fifteenth floor the keys air down the elevator shaft they had to shut down the whole tower, the workers you know, all the famous economist there nobody could use the elevator till they called the fire department to go in the basement and go into the elevator shaft and get the keys so one of my more embarrassing moments and I don't embarrass him very easily with that time my face is really red who knew that keith could crawl? I had no idea here's another one where I match the pictures up with the story they're not directly related to this story but it's based it's about funny things that you think like misheard lyrics when you're little you think things there said one way like I thought it was king henry the ape not king henry the eighth, and I had the picture of king louis from the jungle book that's who I thought king heard my sister thought it was the fbi, not the fbi, so I just wanted to capture some of those, so I grabbed a picture of her and me and and put him on the page so it matches the appropriate time period, but they're not directly related and here's one with no photos at all with our what did you call these whirly gigs down at the bottom? Because they're on the stand. It's actually quite appropriate because it was the year without a christmas card, and I talked about how we didn't do christmas card that year because I usually scrapbook our christmas card, so I have a record of our our card andi didn't take when we didn't take a photo, so I created a layout with no photo to accompany the christmas card with no photo but so it's still in our scrapbook, so but no photo and I still think it looks pretty darn good all right, so last little bit I want to get to before we take a quick break is heritage photos. A lot of people say I want a scrapple, carrot, ege pictures or I inherited a bunch I don't know where to start again he eh that's fantastic that's such a fun thing to do in a fun trip tio investigate more of your story as it occurred, maybe even before you were part of the story. So I definitely suggest scanning things in this makes it easy to share those photos with other people and for you to use copies rather than the originals in case you're worried about that, especially if you get a crop things if you're going to use them as is again, as we talked about, your scrapbooks are pretty safe place to keep heritage photos to keep them safe and keep them from further deterioration. But if you're concerned, scan them in first, you can use originals too it's really again, a personal preference. If you have other people who might be interested in getting copies, scan them him. I also like to scan them. And just because in case anything ever happened to the physical copy, god forbid I would still have the scanned version on my computer in the clouds somewhere wherever that cloud is, um and here's, just a quick pages I did with some photos of my dad, you can see that the photos aren't great. These were all scanned in from his originals, but there you have a little cute two year old that was actually a passport picture. And I pulled it and we had it have little dots down the edge where they had been perforated and just different pictures of my dad and this is one of those times where I just wrote him a letter and I just said dad this is why I love you and this was done for many people will be familiar with the december daily and december daly is a process that something started by alley edwards who is ah really well now scrapbook er and it takes you three ideas documenting your your december because it's such a special time and a lot of people will document their christmas or khanna car whatever holiday celebration there doing I decided I wanted to use each day to write about a different person who's important in my life and so this was day number six and it was done in a five and a half by eight and a half albums so a half size album and it's now one of my most treasured scrapbooks because it's got photos of all the people who are important to me so that's a key one I like that one and I think this is our last one here using the same photo twice to get a good you have permission to do any of these things use them twice using three times or more there are no rules and you might have a different story to tell each time and here's just two pages real quick that I did with the same photo, my sister and me, we've grown up so lovely, haven't we? From the little amy little mindy pictures on this side, I was talking with just single words about the things I missed about her and on this side, and just wanted to talk more about our relationship as a sisters and how that continues to evolve and grow, and I actually love this one, both of them. This one that was actually done with the gotham or blue kit, and the one on the right was mostly simple stories products, too, and they were so generous to provide supplies for us here today, too, so I wanted to give them a big shadow. You can see I love the colors. The bright colors really appealed to me there, and they got some are blue. Kid is always beautiful.