Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Albums, albums, albums

I think I'm a tiny bit OCD about my scrapbook albums. I have fourteen 8.5x11 albums stuffed in 3-ring binders that I bought early on in my scrapping life. None of them match. And they're all extra-large, so the page slide around in them.

Tonight I went to Target and bought five new 3-ring binders, very plain, three red and two pale green, and transferred five albums over. I think they're looking okay on the shelf.However, now I have to go up to Williamsburg tomorrow and try to find nine more, since our local Target didn't have enough.

What I really need to do with these albums is to continue the process I started three years ago of consolidating layouts, editing out photos, and re-doing layouts so that there are fewer layouts, more concisely arranged. I did way too many five, six, seven page layouts early on, because I thought I needed to include every mediocre picture.

But I just don't want to muck around with re-doing stuff right now, because...I also have five 12x12 albums that need some attention. I had a small stack of layouts that were published, sent back to me, and then just sat in a pile, so today I replaced them all in their respective albums, and I have a few albums that are just too, too, too full. I try to do one album per year in my 12x12s, and 2002 is ready to pop. I guess we did a lot of interesting stuff that year, LOL. 2003 isn't much better, and 2004 isn't done yet but promises to be pretty full as well.

Added to that--I'm not totally happy with the albums I'm using for the 12x12s. The books themselves are great, but the covers are all different colors and patterns and I hate the way they look on the shelf. They're too expensive to replace, but I'm just not sure how to extend the 2002 book and what kind of book to order for 2004.

Ugh, I'm boring myself with this. And I suspect I am obsessing over albums because I don't feel like doing any scrapping even though I'm really getting far behind. I made a list of everything I wanted to work on the other day and got myself all twitterpated. I've never been one for goal-setting in my scrapbooking...I've never really kept track of how many pages I do or how many I need to do, but it might be a good idea to do that...put my head down and power through (Arrested Development quote).

Only a manaical scrapper would understand why I do this to myself. I mean, this is a hobby, for crying out loud. Being an insane perfectionist is not helping matters, either. I just need to think positive!