Living With Our Photos

I firmly believe that scrapbooking is about more than applying pictures to paper and throwing on some buttons, ribbon and embellishments. It's about more than journaling the who, what, where, when and why. Scrapbooking is about spending time with your memories, about taking a moment to reflect, to ponder, to smile or to cry.

For years, I have kept all of my pictures in chronological order in albums so that when I needed to find the 1998 Disneyland trip, I knew right where to look. And when I have scrapbooked the photos that tugged at my heart at the moment (or matched the great new paper I just bought--admit it, we've all done it!), they were carefully placed into color coded albums. When we finished my scrapbook room, my husband built a shelf at my request that ran along the top of two walls. The shelf was pretty and was the perfect height to hold my albums. Unfortunately, the shelf was also high enough that I had to stand on a chair to reach any album. But they were safe and they were organized and they were all in my scrapbook room where I could get to them when I needed them so all was well, right? Wrong. It has bothered me over the years that the people I was recording all these memories for really didn't have much opportunity to look at them. Out of sight, out of mind.

Recently, my husband and I revamped my home office. In addition to my Close to My Heart business, I work as an account manager for a company out of Chicago from my home. For two and a half years, I have worked in a corner of my dining room on a creaky antique drop leaf table. Knowing that this room would never officially be a dining room, it was time to get a real desk and some office storage. And one of the things I wanted was book shelves, book shelves that I could put my photo albums on so they were easily accessible to everyone (including 5 ft 2 in me). And so, thanks to Ikea's Expedit shelves, my photos are now in my home office. And you want to know the best part about it? Within an hour, I walked by to see this.

This is exactly what I was going for.


Need some help with photo organization? Check out Stacy Julian's Finding Photo Freedom class on BigPictureClasses.com. She does it yearly and this year's class starts in February. It's well worth the time and money if your photos are overwhelming your life. Or buy her book, Photo Freedom. When I discovered her book and later her class, she not only refined some of the things I was already doing, she took me to the next level.