Laura Vegas

Welcome back to another post about random projects I've been working on this year. You could say that I'm a weekend organizer. I don't usually have the time (it's more like I don't have the energy) to do much during the work week, so the weekend is when I tackle things full speed. And Saturday's are days when I like to be creative in some way, even if it's just organizing things that pertain to my creative life. While I love to scrap, creating actual layouts and such – I love to dive into projects where I'm organizing "stuff" that pertains to memory keeping. 

I have this box on one of the shelves upstairs that is sort of a catch-all basket. Years and years ago, back in 2009, I sorted out some of the random items and created homes for these items with some fun envelopes I had from a kit. You can see and read about those HERE. I still had a massive amount of random stuff that had accumulated in that box. The majority of it was handmade cards from the girls, for Joe and I's birthdays, Mother's Day, and Father's Day. So I set out to tackle those items, and the small amount of stuff left is set aside for another day.

I'm pretty sure it took me a while to remember that I had made those cute folders years ago, and to remember that I still had plenty of them left to work with. When it finally crossed my mind, I knew it was a simple solution. I sorted out the cards into four piles – birthday cards for me, Mother's Day cards for me, birthday cards for Joe, and Father's Day cards for Joe. I pulled out four of the envelopes and this time around, I decorated them super simple and super quick. I didn't over-think this at all. I literally added some chipboard alphas and alpha stickers to each, to describe what was inside. I tucked all of the cards into their envelopes and added a few binder clips to the top of each to hold them closed. 

Something else that I decided to tackle one weekend was photos. Printed photos to be exact. I've had a few boxes of photos in my closet for years, and I would occasionally toss random photos in them. A huge majority of them were film photos, as I didn't go digital until 2006 I believe. So the first 10 years of Alyssa's life and the first 7 years of Sarah's life were captured on film. Those were semi-sorted and organized by year inside the boxes. 

The problem was, I also had photos in other random places. I have lots of digital photos that I've had printed at one point. I have lots of photos that I have printed at home, thinking I would use them on a project, and then not needing them after all, so I shove them in a drawer. I also had a photo album or two that had photos slipped inside from when the girls were little. I've never kept my photos in actual photo albums like that, but I must have tried it out at some point. All I wanted to do was to get ALL of the photos corralled and organized in one central location. 

Since I had a lot of photos organized by year, I started by laying them out on the floor, making a pile for each year. I had a piece of paper on the bottom of each pile, with the year showing, so that I could keep track of which pile went to which year. Then I got to work on the photos I had pulled out of the photo albums, sorting those into the correct year. While having the date the photo was taken printed on the actual photo bothers me when scrapping them, it definitely comes in handy when trying to figure out what year they came from. And most from albums were from my film days, so they had the dates. 

Then I pulled out any other photos I had stashed away in random places. These were a little trickier, since they were mostly from my digital photos. I pulled out my laptop and my external hard drive so that I had easy access to my massive amounts of photos. I keep them all organized by year, and then by month within each year, on my external hard drive. Some of the photos were easy to figure out, as I could open up a year and get a good idea of what photos were taken around that same time. Some of them, I had to do some digging, looking thru folder after folder to find when they were taken. 

In the end, I had every single printed photo in my possession organized by year. From there, I made new dividers for my boxes, making them tall enough that I could add any 5×7" photos in along with all of the 4×6" photos. Most of them are organized by year, but I also had some photos that were in small plastic boxes, for certain events and such. I had a small box with any photos from Alyssa's school days, Sarah's school days, a few boxes with Christmas photos from a few years, a box with photos of our house when it was being built, etc. i wanted to keep those all separate, so one of the four boxes is organized by event or theme. 

This one is kind of random. But I guess all of these are kind of random. These are my binders that hold all of my publications. I know when I first started having projects published in magazines, I would save the entire magazine. But after a while, those magazines pile up and I knew there was no way that I wanted to keep them all, or even needed to keep them all. So at some point, I started saving only what I needed to save from the magazines I was published in. I always tore off the cover of the issue, and then I would carefully tear out any pages inside the issue that had my projects on them. That was all I needed to keep. 

From there, I would adhere these pages to cheap, plain, white cardstock and then slip them into page protectors. There were only a few magazines that were actual 8.5×11" in size, so most of them needed to be added to the white cardstock to fill the protector. I kept them all in order within the binders, so I adhered pages to the front and the backs of the cardstock. 

I still had some magazines laying around that I had never gotten around to going thru and/or tearing out my projects from within the pages of the issues. So a few months back, I took the time to finish going thru everything left that contained a published project of mine. And I worked them all into these binders. I love that I can easily look thru these three binders, and see every project I've ever had published in the last 12 years. Well, with the exception of one. Still kills me that there is ONE lone project where I didn't get a copy of the issue, and there's a spot for it with a post it note within the binder.