Scrappy Times: A Work in Progress-Disney Album 2009

With Caleb starting kindergarten in August I had high hopes of re-starting and finishing my Disney 2009 album. I approached this album differently than I approach my normal scrapbooking. I learned a long time ago that I could never scrap every picture, nor did I want to, so I just started scrapping the pictures that moved me, or the ones that helped tell a story that I wanted to tell. Well, for this vacation album, I wanted to treat it more like a picture album that did have most, if not all, of the pictures from the trip. Over the last couple of years we've been lucky enough to go to Disney several times because of a conference that John goes to every October and it just so happened that it was in Orlando in 2008, Anaheim in 2009, and then back to Orlando in 2010, but in the overall scheme of things going to Disney is not something that we get to do that often.

I finally figured out how I wanted to approach this album. I didn't want to just do a photobook in Shutterfly-I wanted a little more control over it and wanted it to be a bit fancier than that. So, I decided to approach it like my Holidays in Hand album that was taught at Jessica Sprague. Jessica had a template that you used for this album and it was easily manipulated into different configurations. So I decided to use that template throughout this album and then just keep it simple with different papers to match the pictures on the page, a few elements, the journaling and that would be that. That was the idea anyway. I did a few pages and they were turning out ok. I wasn't turning cartwheels over them or anything, but I was making progress. Here's an example of one of the first pages:

Paper and Elements-Crystal Wilkerson Sweet Summertime

Oh, and I was also going to try to do the album with kits I already had in my stash. I'd bought several Disney type kits and had a lot of other bright, cheery, kits that I thought I'd fall back on. Well, I started getting bored with the project and the pages and went looking for a little bit of Disney inspiration. That's when I found Steph's post on The Daily Digi about scrapping Disney. I found two things in that post that really inspired me: 1) Sweet Shoppe Designs-Steph posted several kits from the Sweet Shoppe and I LOVED them. So, I looked the Sweet Shoppe up and I have been hanging out there ever since. My scrapping budget has a very big dent in it now. 2) Aaron Morris-He had some layouts featured on the post that Steph wrote and I loved his style. Turns out he's on the creative team at the Sweet Shoppe. I loved the clustering that he does on his layouts and then I found out that he had a new class at Big Picture Scrapbooking on clustering. I signed up, loved it, and alas, my simple Disney album has morphed into a crazy, clustery, complicated album. I keep telling myself to tone it back down a bit, but then I think the page looks a little sad, and empty and I start adding things to it. Oh well. I'm getting close to being done. Here's a look at some of my clustery pages: