Instead of being overwhelmed....

... with all of the photos I took on my trip to the Congo and the thought of scrapbooking them all (I took almost 500 and then the four men I travelled with all shared copies of their photos, too), I spent some time on the flights home trying to think of how I could make the album:

1. something I'd enjoy creating (& if it consisted of lots of double page layouts, then I knew I wouldn't enjoy it very much)
2. something that would make the process seem less daunting
3. something different than anything else I'd done in the past.

I kept thinking back to Ali's 365 project and how I liked how she was using the divided page protectors for it. I remembered that Marcy had mentionned getting in some divided page protectors from We R Memory Keepers and I wondered if this is something that I could make work for me.

So here's what I did:

1. I stopped at the Shoppe and purchased two packages of the page protectors. At $7.49 each (for 10 protectors) I figured that it was less than a sheet of cardstock & a regular page protector. I also picked up a package of kraft cardstock.

2. I ordered my pictures online, ordering all of the pictures that I wanted to include to tell my stories. I didn't worry too much if some of the pictures wouldn't get used. I ended up ordering 274 prints (so far... I still want to order a few more yet.)

3. After picking up my prints, I sorted them into event type groups and stories I wanted to tell and placed them in piles in chronological order.

Then, I started putting them into either 12x12 page protectors with a kraft cardstock background, like my first couple of pages here:




Or sliding them into the WRMK sleeves.



The pages above tell different stories and I'll treat them as separate layouts. However, sometimes, I picked a few pictures to "scrapbook" on a kraft background and have a page of photos in sleeves beside it to help tell the story.


Sometimes it was a little tricky to make all the sleeves work with my pictures and making sure that back to back worked chronologically. But I felt a certain amount of freedom to add a story here or there to balance the pages.

So now when I feel like scrapbooking, I can pull out a photo from a kraft cardstock background and scrap it like these two:

Or I can take a page of sleeves and add some cardstock/pp for the title and journaling, like I did here.




And I love that all of my pictures are housed in an album where I can flip through and decide which story I feel like telling and not have to worry about how it will all come together in the end.

Thanks for looking!