Welcome to the fourth post in our blueprints: conversations in album design series.
I've been doing quite a bit of behind-the-scenes organizing for some larger album projects. While I know that I don't have any time to work on them at the moment, I like being able to do some of the grunt work now; I've found that creating a plan of action, gathering supplies, and just generally getting everything together in one spot goes a long way toward helping me actually get started on a project when I do have some free time (coming this summer, thankfully!)
One of the projects I want to address is school albums for each of the girls. Cami's album doesn't exist, so I'm free to do what I want. Cassidy, on the other hand, has half of a kindergarten album that's been completed. Here's a look at what I've done thus far -- and no laughing, okay? This album was started back in 2003, which was EARLY in my scrapping career:
This is the cover page (ignore the glare, please). It's a postbound album, sized 8.5x11.
You can see by the Table of Contents that I do have an organizing structure for the album. I essentially sorted through everything I had saved from Kindergarten, including photos, awards, drawings, and then used those items to determine my categories. This was definitely an instance where the format of my album was determined by the materials and content that I needed to include.
Cassidy took all of the photos that are in the main part of the album. I sent her to school with two disposable cameras on the last day. I also received a CD from the teacher of photos from the classroom all year long, so I was able to have documentation of field trips and other special classroom activities.
I should note that as I was working on this blog post, Cass came in and started looking through this album, which was sitting on the desk next to where I'm working. It was so fun to hear her giggling about the photos and looking back at samples of her work. Definitely an incentive to continue working on this project, rather than shoving it back in the closet where it's been for the past 7 years.
If you'll look back at the Table of Contents for this album, you'll see that each category has a colored square of paper next to it. That indicates the color of the page backgrounds so that I can keep things a bit more organized.
So there you have it -- the beginnings of Cassidy's Kindergarten album. In looking at this project, I will most likely keep it as a separate project for a couple of reasons: 1) it is partly completed and 2) everything is gathered together (I just need to finish it). But I want something more cohesive and something EASIER for grades 1-5, 6-8, and 9-12.
I decided to approach this album as I do other projects -- by brainstorming. Since this album will be organized chronologically by grade, I grabbed a copy of the chronological graphic organizer I created (you can find it here) and jotted down the main events from each grade, 1-5. I enlisted Cassidy's help for this step, because I think it is important to include the girls whenever I can on projects like this. Here's what we came up with:
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The items in red are events where I want to scrap pages that include my own perspective; the other pages will be mostly from Cassidy's perspective (or a more objective 3rd person POV). The space at the bottom of the organizer allowed me to make some additional notes -- reminders about school names and dates, plus some thoughts about the overall structure of this album.
Once I had my general list completed, I was able to look at it and think about where I am right now. Some of these pages have already been scrapped. Some of them are waiting in my "to-scrap" pile. At this point, I really need to stop and gather my materials -- this means finding school pages from other albums, looking through photo archives, and cleaning out document folders. Once I've sorted those materials, I'll be able to determine what I've already completed, what still needs to be completed, and what format will most effectively help me get those stories compiled in one spot.
I'll be checking back in in two weeks to walk you through my process of sorting through my materials, document folders, and photo archives; in the meantime, check out these great links to see some school-album ideas and projects that I think are fantastic:
Stay tuned; Liz will be posting next week with more fantastic ideas for album planning. As always, feel free to leave comments or questions on our blogs or via Formspring; we love to hear from you.
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