Cover to Cover - the Album Conundrum

Have I mentioned how much I am enjoying the Cover to Cover class I am taking at the moment? It is really making me think about the hows and whys of my scrapbooking and the best way to share our family stories. I have been reading and watching all the prompts but struggled to act on more than a couple last week. I set aside some time today (thank you Pre School and Slow Cooker for making that possible) and am up to Prompt Five which is looking at how to divide my albums.

I am not a chronological scrapbooker in terms of the order in which I work on projects but I certainly am leaning towards two chronological albums to cover our family year. The first will be my Project Life album and the second will be a 12 x 12 layout album exploring some of those events in more depth. I love Project Life and I intend to keep it going as long as possible but I do find that I tend to gloss over some of the stories from a busy week as a result of space constraints. The additional 12 x 12 layout album will allow me to address that challenge and keeping things in chronological order really does make sense with these two albums. 

In addition I am looking at two or possibly three travel albums. The first will be a Japan album. We go to Japan every year and I think it makes sense to keep all those photos together. Obviously there will be aspects recorded in Project Life of these trips but the major recording will take place in a separate album from now on. A second travel album will be a New Zealand album. We get home leave every other year and we tend to have extended visits of up to a month when we are there so again it makes sense to keep our New Zealand experiences separate. The third album will be of our other travel. Short hops to Indonesia and Malaysia and week long trips to Phuket do not require their own album but I do like keeping our travel adventures somewhat separate from our real everyday life.

I am in two minds about a separate Scarlett album beyond a first year album. We do everything together as a family with the exception of what she gets up to at Montessori so I think a separate album might be a little redundant. I might revisit this if we have another child but at this stage I think I am happy to have her life included as part of our family life - she will be the one inheriting the albums after all! I also need to do a wedding album as that is long overdue and my beautiful photos deserve more of a home than my hard drive.

I have been pulling things out of albums and reorganising the contents of my albums a little (so glad I only have two and not thirty to think about!). I like the new feeling of possibility this exercise has given me. It has also given me more focus on what  storiesI want to tell with my layouts. 

How do you organise your albums? Has Project Life changed anything for you? Would this process be overwhelming to you or a welcome fresh start?

I cannot recommend this class enough and no one is asking me to say that. Please check out Shimelle's website here if you think this class might be your thing as I am sure you will really start to examine the way you organise your albums.

I really don't want to have a picture free post so I will add in a layout I whipped up last night. It is a pretty minimalist piece but I am very happy about how it turned out. The model loves it too.