Scrapbooking was the order of the weekend

I've written posts about scrapbooking before, but it's not something I share regularly. However, I do get the occasional e-mail asking me to write more about it, so I thought today would be a good opportunity to do that.

I spent the weekend at a local hotel at our annual Winter Crop, which is hosted by my good friend Laura and attended by several other close friends. We crop from Friday morning through Saturday night, returning home on Sunday morning. It's always so much fun!

This year 25 women attended, so the room was full but not crowded.

I take so many pictures that I like to get the most pictures possible on a page. Several years ago I started laying most of my pages out in what I'd describe as a color-block style, meaning that I crop non-essential parts out of photos and lay them out on the page(s) strategically, trying to maximize the number of images without compromising their quality. (I first wrote about the technique here.)

[Depending on your browser, you should be able to click once on each image and view it larger on your screen if you want to.]

For example, for last year's beach trip, I chose the pictures to use and cropped them down to size, then arranged them on the page.

Next I added journaling boxes and embellishment boxes, cut to size for the remaining blank spaces on the page. Then I added stickers that coordinated with the theme.

This is typically the longest trip we take during the year, so it usually takes several pages to cover, although with all other events I try to stick to a two-page spread, in general. This is the layout in Jake's book, so the pictures I included are more about him, whereas in the other boys' books the pictures I included featured them more often.

Still working in Jake's book, this was what I did for his first movie in a theatre. Again, I chose the pictures I wanted to try to use, then looked at their orientation (horizontal vs. vertical) and figured out how many I could fit on the page.

I added the titling and journaling boxes in coordinating colors.

And then I added the titles and embellishments.

Jake's first trip to the dentist ... I knew I had more photos than I could use, because I definitely wanted to keep it to one page. Decisions, decisions.

I cropped them and adhered them to the page:

And then I added the titling and journaling boxes, and embellished with stickers.

I use this same process on almost every page I create. Here are a couple more layouts from Jake's book that I completed over the weekend:

After I caught up in Jake's book, I moved to Nick's book. Here's the layout for his 6th birthday party:

And here's a layout from our family book that I did for a camping trip at Oak Mountain:

This is the layout I did in our family book for the lake trip in Chattanooga:

And if those pictures look familiar, it's because most of them were also in Jake's book, too (here it is again, for comparison):

That was a good way to show you how I try to switch up the pictures I use in each book (the three for the boys and then our family album), so that I don't get too bored doing them four times and so that each person's photos in their album are more tailored to them.

This layout is also from the family book and was also a lake trip, but this time to Smith Lake, just north of Birmingham:

I'd say the majority of croppers (scrapbookers) don't try to cram as many pictures on a page as I do. For instance, one woman at the crop we attended does beautiful pages, but she usually only puts one or two pictures on a page for a single event.

She also uses a lot of 3-D elements, which I never use because I don't like for my books to be bulky. But her designs are gorgeous.

Here are a couple more of her pages, so you can see the marked difference between our styles:

I have more to say about templating or color-blocking, but I'll save it for another day. I hope to be able to give you some mock-ups of templates that you can print out and use as a guideline for working on your own pages sometime soon.