Wednesday, July 7, 2010

digital process....and why i love it:)

i switched over to digital scrapbooking in november of last year..so it has been about 8 months or so. one of the things i love is that i have been able to REALLY streamline my scrapbooking. no mess, no clean-up and best of all, no real stress. the only thing that phased me a little was the failure of my external hard-drive, but i recovered pretty quickly because i was able to retrieve almost all of the supplies i had purchased. sure, i lost a bunch of freebies i had collected, but i also lost the clutter i had accumulated in the last few months.
organization of supplies is the bane of most scrapbookers lives and going digital has not changed that part of the process for me. luckily i have an endless supply of information at my fingertips via the internet, so i have come up with my own process that makes sense for the way that i work.
  • i have pretty much limited the places i buy my supplies from. my favorite stores are designerdigitals, designhousedigital and thedailydigi. sometimes i will purchase a few things here and there, but not very often. i know my style well and these places suit me. about 95% of my supplies are in kit form and i keep them in folders by store origin on my computer desktop.easy and simple...and i try not to micro-manage.
  • i love freebies, but i am very selective about the things i download. i LOVE templates and tend to use those freebies a LOT. as soon as i make 2-3 pages from one free supply, it gets thrown out. it is a way to keep my scrapbooks fresh and current, plus it is a wonderful way to try things that you never would have tried before. ALWAYS make sure that you check TOU's and acknowledge the designer if you post the finished product on any gallery or blog. it's the least you can do.
  • not every picture needs to be scrapped..and it has taken a long time for me to understand this concept. the fact that i am doing my pages digitally has helped me to become more selective in what pictures i scrap, instead of just uploading and printing everything. less money spent, ore awesome memories that can be recorded. i think it is a win-win:)
  • portable scrapbooking is a wonderful thing. all of my supplies are contained in my laptop and i am able to interact more with my family. gone are the days of the dungeon basement scraproom. YAY! plus i have been able to reclaim a lot of my space. living in the nyc means the real estate is limited and now i have room to move around in. it is a great thing.
  • a little about my current work flow: i pick the best pictures from my picture folders. right now i am doing chrono. type photobooks thru shutterfly in 8x8. the pictures that do not fit are scrapped in single pages and stored in my set of american crafts 8x8 3-ring binders that are set up as per stacy julian's library of memories system. it is working so far! i usually will set up a bunch of pictures into templates and embellish them later. right now i have about eight pages ready to be scrapped in my planned pages folder. using templates makes things so much easier and FUN. once they are scrapped i either upload them to costco or scrappingsimply for single pages and shutterfly for photobooks. lately i have been doing a LOT of photobooks and i LIKE them:)
i think that is about it. tomorrow i will be posting my favorite kis and things:)

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