Now that Joshua’s back in school, I’ve had a little bit more time to work on projects. Not as much time as you would think, because by the time I walk the dog, shower, dress and tidy up a bit, I have about an hour to do what I want. One of my projects is catching up on photos. This is definitely something I need to do more regularly because the first set of pages I did took me about ten hours and I covered a week of photos. Most of the time was spent figuring how to do things, where things were, etc. I’m in a better rhythm now, but I’ve spent a big hunk of time organizing my supplies. Which were sort of already organized. But I think the photo below shows that I need a better setup while working on this. (And moving my sewing machine out of the way would probably help too.)

A lot of my time gets sucked up by flipping through my supplies. I’ve got a lot of great embellishments but how do I make it easy to find things? This morning, I emptied out some clear drawers I have on my work table and sorted my embellishments into the drawers. I don’t use the stuff in those drawers very often so it was a waste to have them so close at hand. I was able to relocate those items to other parts of my office.

Next, I went through all my stamps and stickers and used this system to organize them. I then put them in the drawer next to my workspace so that I can flip through them easily. I need to order more sleeves as I ran out, but I like how quickly I can flip through everything. I also have some traditional stamps stored in 4×6 plastic photo boxes from the Container Store.

The part that still needs some work is all my project life cards. I belong to a monthly club which is where 80% of all these supplies have come from. It’s cool because I get things I’ve never seen before or would ever consider buying. I don’t know how to use a lot of them, but I’m learning. Anyway, I have a ton of different kinds of cards and I’ve spent a lot of time flipping through them. And then again. Some are journaling cards, some have sayings or pictures. I need to sort them by type of card. Currently, they are separated by collection but that doesn’t really mean anything to me. I do like having them on the cart because I can tuck it out of the way when I’m not using it.

So here’s a few of the pages that I’ve completed. They are mainly from January. I use all different kinds of pages. I’m happy with how they are turning out. It gives it a scrapbooky feel without being quite as time consuming as scrapbooking. I especialy like that it has a personalized touch with the journaling.

If you have any photo/scrapbooking/project lifing tips, I’d love to hear them. My next post on this topic will be about my process which I’m still refining. But I think that will also help the project go more quickly.

Cheers.