Scary scrapbook math

Took a break from the quilting yesterday-- N and I were having another crafty day, and this time I brought scrapbook stuff and worked on that while she painted. I worked on a bit more when I got home, so all in all I ended up with 3 pages done and about 6 others in various stages of completion. Here's what I got done:

(It's hard to tell on the black/white/red one, but the red blotches are little feet with dashed lines drawn over the page to resemble dance steps.

This one was my absolute favorite page that I've done in a long time. The paper on the left side was the inspiration-- I liked the design too much to cover it up with a bunch of photos. So I used my xacto knife to cut out bits of it to layer over the photo on that page, and then cut parts out of a second piece to add the grass (which, though you can't tell, is the same part of the paper as the left side), the branches, the moon and the lanterns. And the title words too, which are filled in with a piece of the sky from the left side. It took forever, but the results were so worth it.

I was also experimenting with trying to get a distressed-pattern paper look for my road trip album-- partially so I can control the color scheme (it's too hard to find papers in the color scheme I want that match each other-- believe me, I've tried!) but mostly because it's a lot easier on my wallet to just buy some of those 25-packs of cardstock from createforless.com. (Plus then I don't have to try and figure out how many pages I'm going to end up with, seeing as how I still have a ton of photos to upload for printing. And I just noticed that everything I tried to upload today didn't upload- GRAR!) Anyway, this is acrylic paint on black paper (both brushed and brayered on) and then sanded for blending. I was hoping more of the black would show-- might have to try a higher grit sandpaper.

Anyway, the scary scrapbook math. I figured out that I have about 7 scrapbooks to make. I haven't completed a single scrapbook (except for one for a Flordia vacation) since I finished college, though the ones from my grad school days are close to completion. So that's 4 scrapbooks in various stages of getting done (because the one from this past year and the year before that have many missing pages.) I still need to finish the Chile album from January, and I have to assemble the road trip album in its entirety (including actually getting the photos printed, which I'm hoping I can finish the touch-up edits tomorrow so I can place that order.) Actually, I have 8 to work on, really, because since I tend to start the new ones in the summer (habit from my high school days on--I'd run out of room by the end of the school year, so I'd do the summer and following school year), the pages from stuff over this past summer (which, due to the road trip getting its own album, I think comes out to about 4) will likely need to go into a new album.

Because of this, I've come to the conclusion that I need to get better about working this into my craft time instead of all sewing almost all the time, because it's just going to fall further behind. So I'm going to attempt to get into the habit of making one layout a week. Some weeks it'll probably be more, because I'll get on a scrapbook binge on occasion and just make a ton of pages in a day (like yesterday). And the actual math might be a bit off for awhile, because once I get my cardstock for the road trip, I'll probably assemble it in pieces-- like paint all the cardstock in one period, try to figure out what photos go where in another so I know how many pages I'll need, copy and mark the routes on a road map in one, etc. But I'm hoping this method will make it come together relatively quickly, or at least as quickly as an album involving hundreds of photos and all the random memorabilia like the maps can.

I do hope I can find a way to balance this-- I definitely have seasonal sewing projects that need to get done, like my coat that I'm currently working on. But I figure one layout a week is a pretty reasonable goal, because I can probably just sit down on a Sunday afternoon and do one, or something like that. I guess I'll have to really wait and see how my work schedule turns out.