Shhhhh......Don't Tell Russell

Shhhh. Don't tell Russell. You have to promise not to tell. Promise? Okay. True confession time.

Russell bought me this super cool laptop for Christmas/birthday (coming in Feb.) so I could start doing things digitally like scrapbooking. And recently, like today, I finished a free book from Shutterfly for his Valentine's Day present and have come to the conclusion that I'm  thinking I like a "manual" approach better. My wrist is still sore from using the cordless mouse on this project. But  isn't my computer super cute??!! Plus, it supports the Susan G. Koman foundation.

But I thought I would show you my organizational approach just in case this is up your alley.

To start with the book was 20 pages which means page  1 stands alone and the others are double page spreads. Plus, you need a cover. So to start with I made categories of things I loved about Russell. Then I found pics to go along with those titles. Once I found all my pics, I did a rough draft on notebook paper to figure out what should come first. The check marks indicate that I finished that page.

The other printouts you see are tutorials on how to do things in photo shop. I save those in a notebook for later.

On my laptop, while Sophia is watching Caillou or Max and Ruby, I work on my project.

I called this my V book so Russell wouldn't know what it was if he saw what I was working on. I also went to different galleries and got inspiration from other graphic designers. I store all those ideas in my scrapbook ideas folder.

Inside my V book folder, I made up these 4 folders to help organize the process, which is another reason I like "manual" better. It's instant gratification. Once you make it, you're done. However, via digitally, you are not.

While I'm working on layouts, all work gets saved in the layouts section. After that, if I decide to share pages on my blog, I save them to the "for web" section. Once each page is ready to print, I save it in the "for print" section, meaning it's ready to upload to Shutterfly.

This page shows the different categories of pictures I had. Each category was either a page or 2 pages, depending on how many photos I had.

Let me warn you, when working on the cover, make sure everything is towards the center cause it crops a ton  off.

I know it sounds like I'm not a fan of digital scrapbooking, and in many ways, I am NOT, but it is good if you're making multiple copies of the same scrapbook like I did for the grandparents for Christmas Sophia's first year. I made them (and us) a copy of The ABC's of Sophia's First Year. But for my family album, I will stick to "manual" scrapbooking. Just don't tell Russell. :)

I'll post some layouts from my other ventures into digital scrapbooking on  a future post.