CrazyDaisy

Me working on my “Finish Line” scrapbook

While at CHA, Jennifer and I took Stacy Julian’s “Finish Line Scrapbooking” class. I’ve mentioned this before, and promised to come back with the details. So, I’m finally getting back to tell you all about it.

Not sure what finish line scrapbooking is? I would describe it as running, actually I mean sprinting,  a marathon in two hours. It’s the ultimate speed scrapping event. Under Stacy’s direction we each culled through 40 some odd photos (mine were from my wedding); cropped those photos; created 18 6×6 scrapbook pages;  and started to embellish the pages.

In the two hours, we were moving non stop. We weren’t thinking as much as doing. We stopped obsessing and just worried about creating. Now, this isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s actually more than a little hard and there were many times I felt like I was going to puke. Seriously. It was that overwhelming at times! But, at the end of the session I had a mini book that just needed to be embellished.

Last night, as I was watching “Lost” I did just that. I broke out my mini book and added like embellishments to create a flow from page to page … and of course add more visual interest. So over the course of two evening, I have lovely little mini-book featuring my wedding photos.

In the class, Stacy shared six steps to getting the “job” done in record time.

1. Title and quick sort. In about the length of a single song, Stacy had us select a title page photo and sort through our pictures to decide which ones would make the final cut.

2. Crop first. We took the stack of pictures we had settled on and cropped for the length of three songs. Stacy advised to crop out all the crap (my word, not her) that was taking up valuable real estate, but not offering anything. It’s a little scary to crop when you have no idea where and how you are going use a photo. But, the more I think about it the more sense it make. If you look at a photo it’s pretty easy to see what’s important and what’s just filler. Get rid of the filler.

3. Assemble and order your pages. After all the crazy cropping we did, we took our photos and started slapping them on pages. And when I say slap, I mean slap. Stacy said just put to photos on the page without think too much about what we were doing. She suggested we follow out gut and let intuition take over. I said it last week and I’ll say it again … I think too much. During this process, Stacy forced us to stop thinking and just create. 

4. Balance correction.Once you all your pages built, then it’s time to balance out your pages. Some times you’ll realize that maybe you need to flip your pages around, reorder your pages or add elements that will create more balance on your pages. Now is the time to do that. You can also use this part of the process to hide blemishes or tweak pages that don’t look the way you want them to.

5. Embellish.Using a limited number and like embellishments, you can jazz up your pages and create flow in your album. For this book, we were asked to use black embellishments and I also snuck in some bling and crystals.  

6. Finishing touches.Wrap it up. Add the last bits of embellishment. Decorate the cover … and almost like magic in just a few short hours, you are done.

I can’t say that I’ll scrap like this all the time, but I can seriously see how I could use this technique when I want to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time, create gifts for friends and family or just catch up. I’ll call it crafting with a purpose.

As soon as I finish my cover, I’ll post pictures of the finished project. I also want to add a single page of journaling to make it a tad more meaningful.