Changing Gears: Documenting Australia

First of all, thank you to everyone who attended my How to Ice Dye Fabric webinar yesterday. We had lots of good questions and it was so much fun for me to share LIVE one of my obsessions. I’ve been pretty much knee deep in that preparation and other artsy stuff (and gardening) this last month so I’m changing gears a bit.

I’ve been inspired by Lynn who is working on getting her studio cleared out and organized. I did that awhile back and you can see my studio here. It still needs some tweaking, but basically I still like how I’ve arranged it. And that’s the reason for this post. In order to do a bit of reorganizing, I need to finish some projects I planned that are sitting on the floor or under the work table.

One of those projects is Australia – my photo/scrapbook of that wonderful bucket list trip we took in January. But it’s hard to know where to start – We took over 2,000 pictures between the two of us. However, Barbara and Bob had asked to see our pictures awhile back so we were forced to put our favorites on a memory stick that would show on their television. Even though that was hard back then, I thought it would be great for when I finally got around to making the photo/scrap book.

What really pushed me to work on this is the special offer email from Winkflash for 113 free photos. That would put a big dent in the ones we wanted for this book. I ended up ordering 200, which did not cover the whole trip. But I really thought if I had all of them printed – that would be way too overwhelming to me.

So that’s what I’m about to attempt in the next couple of weeks – getting these 200 photos and other memorabilia organized and put into some type of order. Since we take so many pictures I don’t do much scrapbooking, but like to have the opportunity if needed. I found these great photo/scrap books several years ago when I went to document our trip to Italy and our Hawaii honeymoon.

I like that they can be used as scrapbooks, but because they have a variety of sleeve configurations, they can also be used for lots of photos.This first page is a traditional scrapbook page.

Then the divided page on the right gives me more room for all of our pictures.
 

Unfortunately, the company quit making the sleeves and the binders that look like boxes. However, I’ve found a substitute. They aren’t quite made as well, but will work. And the other day I started working on our Australia photo/scrap book.

I have three pages which include this spread completed. It’s a start and hopefully in a couple weeks I’ll have these first 200 pictures and the notes from the trip completed so I can order the remaining pictures. I really enjoy doing this because it makes me relive the trip, but I have to find all of my notes. Usually I keep them in my handmade pocket travel journal, but this year I wrote them on my Ipad. Now I need to download those notes (guess I can do that – I’ll find out!) so I can remember what happened when!

I’ll still be doing and sharing some art, but completing this will be a major focus for the next couple of weeks. Completing this will accomplish a goal, but it will also help me clean up my studio. Of course, I still have several other trips that I’ve wanted to document that are also on the floor under the table. They will probably remain there until I get motivated again!

Hope you are having a great day.