Laura Vegas

I'm back with my final "random project" post of the week. Once I started typing up some of these posts, and remembered what a rambler I can be, I realized I could have broken these down into way more posts and spread them out over several weeks. Not that I don't have more random thoughts I could be sharing. Hope you've enjoyed just a little bit of my random sharing. I'll be back next week with a few new projects 😉

Late last year, I came across an amazing daily deal on WRMK leather albums at Steals, and couldn't pass it up. I had been wanting to switch out my albums for a long time, as I had been using the American Crafts Modern albums, which are made of chipboard. They were super affordable, and I actually got a huge majority of them on an amazing deal as well, which made them even more affordable. They worked and did their job. But they weren't as sturdy as I would like, once I started thinking long term. I love the quality of WRMK albums, but they're a little pricier. So more of an investment, when you have as many albums as I have. But when you find them at basically 66% off, you don't even think. You just buy. Tell me you'd do the same thing? Please, tell me you would 😉

  

I switched out a bunch of my albums on that first go-around. I ended up switching my family albums to red, as they used to be in brown albums. This was because I was able to snag more red albums then the brown and black, and I need more albums for the family albums. I then switched the girls albums from red and green, over to black and brown. That's because each time I came across this amazing deal, they only had albums in red, brown, and black. I ended up with a mish-mash of albums, as I only had half of them switched out for several months.

After checking the daily deals at Steals for months and months, the deal on WRMK albums came up again. So I snatched up enough albums to finish switching out all of my family albums, as well as the girls albums. I eventually picked up some green albums as well from Beverly's (using my 50% off coupons when they came around), as they're the only store around that carries these albums. I only needed three, as they were for my own albums. 

I still have plenty of other types of albums on my shelves, that may or may not get switched out to the WRMK albums at some point. Or they may stay how they are. Time will tell. I'll have to blog another day about how when I went to switch all of my layouts into these new albums, I actually cleaned out my layouts and got rid of a bunch of them. I mentioned it on Instagram, and I got some strong reactions. Lol. I'll share more about that at some point. 

I love the way these albums look on my shelves, and love the labels on the side so that I can easily see what I'm looking for. I downloaded the template for the labels from Cathy Zielske (you can find them HERE) and just love how clean they look.

So, I mentioned the other day that I started a Project Life album this year. Even though I haven't done Project Life since the original Project 365 version came out in 2009, I have still managed to collect quite a few Project Life related products. I have purchased several of the core kits, as well as some of the smaller, mini kits. I'm a big fan of Simple Stories, and have picked up a lot of their SNAP packs over the years. I also picked up several of the Documenter kits from Studio Calico during an amazing sale. Basically, I had a very random collection of 3×4" and 4×6" cards from multiple manufacturers. 

One weekend, I took out every pocket page type product I could think of, and corralled it into one location. The only thing that I didn't take out was some Candid Card sets from Bella Blvd (they have several sets with the 3×4" and 4×6" cards), or any of the 12×12" patterned papers that have cards you can trim apart. Then I got to work getting them organized and finding a good home for them. 

  

I knew where I would store my 3×4" cards, as I had purchased a few of these wooden trays at TJ Maxx a few years ago. I actually have one tray that holds all of my enamel dots, and the other has been sitting empty on my shelf all this time. The 3×4" cards fit perfectly in the slots. I made some dividers from white cardstock, and used a label punch to create tabs from white cardstock as well. I stapled them to the top of the divider using my Tiny Attacher, and just used a pen to write what was what on the labels. 

I know some sort their cards by color, but I can't do that. I like to keep things by manufacturer, and sometimes, I even sort by collection/theme, within each manufacturer. I had some cards that came in pads, so I carefully removed each card from the pad, as I wanted all of the cards loose and easy to go thru. As I went thru the Project Life core kits, I took the time to put aside any of the cards that I knew I wouldn't use. The core kits give you SOOO many of each card, and there were definitely ones that I knew I wouldn't use that often, or ones that I just knew I wouldn't use at all. 

For the 4×6" cards, I remembered a storage tip I had seen ages ago on Instragram. They had used one of the IRIS photo & craft keepers (like this one HERE) to hold their Project Life cards, and I screenshotted the idea so that I would remember it. I had two of these containers that I've had forever, and one was completely empty. The one I show in the image above holds twelve of the smaller containers (they each hold 4×6" photos/cards), but I did end up switching to the larger one that holds eighteen I believe. 

I also kept the 4×6" cards organized by manufacturer. Some might have 2, 3, 4, or even more of the containers, like actual Project Life cards, Simple Stories, etc. I have some of the Simple Stories sets that also have 2×2" and 3×3" cards, so these went into these containers along with their coordinating 4×6" cards. 

Both the IRIS container and the wooden tray slip into one cube on my Expedit shelf in my scrap room. The wooden tray sits right on top of the container. When I go to work on my album, I just pull both out and carry them out into the other room to spread out on my big scrap island.

  

Last, but not least, another random project that I worked on recently, was re-painting my scrapbook room. I started out with my scrap space in the downstairs bedroom when we moved into this house, almost 15 years ago. Then, about 5 years later, I moved my space into the upstairs loft area (you can see some of that HERE). A few years later, I made the smart decision to move back downstairs, and into the bedroom again. I just went to find where I blogged about that (seen HERE) and was surprised to see that was in 2009. I remember thinking while moving back to the bedroom that I really, really wanted to re-paint it. But I didn't want to take the time to do it, and figured I would get to it at some point down the road. 

Well, seven years later I was finally motivated to paint it. When I was first in this room, the walls were this great light sage green. When I moved my scrap space upstairs, we turned the room into a sort of "hang out" room for the girls, and I painted it this light aqua color. It's not bad. But I knew it wasn't what I wanted in my scrap room, once I moved back down. I knew right away I wanted to go back to some sort of green.

  

It was a ton of work, with it being such a small bedroom and having some large pieces of furniture (the desk won't even fit out the door), and lots of scrap stuff shoved in that room. But, I also had a good plan on how to do it in three stages, so that while it was a lot of work – it also wasn't too much work. It did involve me moving everything from one of my Expedit shelves into the playroom, and all of the random things like my white storage cubes, everything from my desk, everything stored on top of the Expedit shelves, etc. But from there, I was able to work around the two Expedit shelves, moving everything from one shelf to the empty shelf and then back again, and shifting the desk around the room as I went. 

I love the new color. It's "Fresh Artichoke" by Behr. The choice was made pretty simple for me, as there wasn't that many good greens to choose from. At least not in the brand of paint I was looking at. It's a tad bit darker than I would have liked, but it's also a great shade of green. Oddly similar to the green I have on some walls in the rest of the downstairs. 

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.