Negatives and tools

I finished my time line of my printed photos (ones using 110 and 35 mm film). I tracked down some negative sleeves at a local Ritz photo store. Actually 50 pages of negative storage. Each holds 7 strips of 35 mm negatives. (I will definitely be needing hundreds more of these negative sheets before I'm finished.)
Now I'm on a hunt for what to do with the 110 negatives. If anyone has seen storage (preferably sheets that fit into a binder: 3 hole, 8.5 x 11) I'd appreciate the info.
Anyway I began filling up those 50 sheets last night as I watched a little TV. That's going to take a bit of time - but little by little it will get done. I know in Stacy Julian's book "Photo Freedom" she says just throw the negatives in a box - keep them safe and don't worry about organizing them. But I am just not up for doing that. Her reasoning was sound (if some disaster happens she won't mind looking through the negatives) but for me - well I just don't want to do it. I have so many years of photos and will no doubt want to get reprints. I know this because as I've gone through the packs of photos I have found not all the prints are there. They were given away or used on some pages or I just don't know why they aren't there. So having the negatives organized is important to me. But like I said I will be doing the organization in small bites. A little here, a little there.
And a quick note before I run - I was working on a layout this morning. More for my son's baby scrapbook. I was looking at all the photos and realized they all could fit on 2 pages (instead of the original 3 I planned) if I cropped them a bit better. Then I realized I could use my rectangle Nestabilities and get this cropping done in no time. And I did! All cut to the same rectangle size in a matter of minutes. I love it!

I've been busy

Reading .....
Photo Freedom by Stacy Julian and Family History Scrapbooking by Becky Higgins
Now you might be thinking - I thought you gave up on all these books and magazines. And yes I have. I stopped my magazine subscriptions entirely. But these 2 books have been nagging at me since they came out. The Becky Higgins book came out while I was still working at the store and I didn't even look at it I was so disenchanted with all the books at the time. The Photo Freedom book has only been out a few months but it talks about (in detail) Stacy's system that she's mentioned in both her previous books (which I have) and covers in her online class Library of Memories (which I'd love to take but it ain't cheap. I hoped for a "book" version and my prayers were answered LOL).
I picked up the Family History book at AC Moore with a 50% off coupon. It's really pretty great. I know it will help me down the line when I attack the stacks and stacks of old family (my childhood etc) photos I have. But what's on my mind is the pictures I've got from my college days onward - I was telling my friend June howI've been reading the book and began the timeline Stacy talks about in the beginnning. You timeline your photos so you have a reference point (who was what age when this happened for example). I created a little spreadsheet and am just about done with that and I've discovered I have 190 packages of photos in 9 boxes.
Frightening huh?
And that doesnt even count the 5 years of digital photos I've got.
So I needed to get this under control - and I'm thinking this book is going to help me out immensely. If nothing else, I've gotten a renewed enthusiasm and also realize there is more than one way to skin a cat (Frankie & Spencer - you didnt hear me type that!)
I'll be finishing my timeline probably today or tomorrow and then onto the scarey part - taking some of the photos out of chronological order (not all but some). I'll let you know how I do.

I'm back and I'm done

well i might journal a bit more here and there

but essentially I'm done with the Wedding Album

can i hear a Hallelujah?

Hallelujah!

Here are the last of the pages with photos

And here are the pages with a lot of memorabilia - shower invitations and cards, Pre-Cana stuff, wedding banns from the church bulletin, items from the reception venue; a swatch of faric from the bridesmaids dresses; receipt for my dress; receipt for my husbands ring; our receipts from our blood tests - you know that kinda thing. Yes, I'm a pack rat but for all pack rats everywhere - there's no better place to store your treasures than a scrapbook!

The only thing remaining is like i said a little journaling and actually purchasing a scrapbook to fill with all these pages. I saw a really pretty one the other day at AC Moore (it was a K&Company album. They make such pretty albums - especially for an extra special occasion like a Wedding album).

What else have i been up to? Well other than what you see on Small Smackerels - let's see. Yesterday i did a lot of cleaning in my room here. I also found a stack of my daughters artwork from elementary school. I know i put photos of some of them in her elementary school album but just to be on the safe side I took photos of all of them (it was a small stack - only the absolute musts I had to keep for her) and then put the originals in a page protector to add to that album. I'll get the pics printed and add that as well when i have a second.

While i was cleaning up in here I kept finding odds and ends - things that need to go on pages. Mostly memorabilia. My name should be Suzy the-pack-rat Scrapbooker okay. I threw those in my RTG file. Tomorrows project will be to get that RTG file back in order so I can actually work from it again - its trashed folks! In the interest of actually getting the cleaning up done around here, I couldnt get too fussy with how i put stuff into that file.

After that's done, I think I'm going to stick with my plan to work on my kids baby albums. I won't be as crazy as i was about getting them done as I was the wedding album. Afterall - the wedding album was pretty limited in its scope. A baby album for each kid will take a lot of time. Because I know it's just not "baby". It's really their lives up until they reach school.

And, as I'm sure all you parents know - that's some premium photo takin time.

It's gonna take a while but thats ok. I know I'm going to enjoy looking at those pictures again.

oh the suspense of it all

especially when i figure i'm talkin to myself most of the time here. (wink)

ok the last picture i posted was of this album

I bought this album in 1984 - shortly after I was married. We had a stack of photographers proofs, candid photos friends and family had given us, and various and sundry memorabilia i had collected - all wedding related. (actually there are a few relationshippy items too) I needed a place to put them so they would be safe.

Safe is the operative word in that sentence. When we moved here 10 years ago i had put all the photos together in i think 2 large boxes - this album and a few other albums included. I think that was the last time i looked at any of them. At the time they seemed fine. A few months ago i hauled out the unpacked box and pulled this album out and was a little concerned. There were obvious signs of deterioration - not to my photos - yet - but to the pages of the album. Since the album is over 20 years old I know now it is a very unsafe place for those pics etc to be. The pages have this glue on it - under the plastic protective peel up pages - i guess they really didn't mean "magnetic" its really just plain old sticky. Anyway that glue is turning brown. And fortunately for me my photos etc are not stuck to it. (I know how bad these kinds of albums really are: my mom had one and the photos and news clippings are stuck so bad to the pages you'd have to destroy the items to get them out of there. Bad. Really bad. When I made her an album a few years back i had some of those items colored copied to include in my album - as well as save them at that stage of deterioration.)

Here's a picture of the inside of my album. If you click on the photo you'll be able to see the browning at the edges of the pages.

So - finally it was time to get this project off my tadoo list. I don't want anything to happen to these pictures etc. They're old and there are no negatives. Yes, I have the photographers album (which is gorgeous and has the best photos of the day) but it doesn't have all these pictures and memorabilia.

I will post some of the pages i've made thus far. I'm not going totally Suzy and just getting it done - but i'm not going off the deepend either with papers and embellishments either. Sort of a happy medium.

Now i've come to the portion of our program kids where i'm gonna do my first little rant. I know its most unbecoming of Suzy to rant but allow me a small amount of latitude.

Preservation is important. Saving old photos is really important. And ensuring that original photos (where there is no negative available) are safe is a worthy use of your time. I think its very important to consider the products you're using. Most of the stuff out there for sale is pretty safe. But i've noticed a trend in scrapbooking where people are using anything and everything on their pages. Recently in particular i saw some people reusing packaging from different products to make things. Recycling is a wonderful thing - but not on your pages that have irreplaceable photos - ok kids? If you wanna make art do it with a copy of your irreplaceable photo - not the original.

Ok- that wasn't so bad now was it. Suzy doesn't like controversy so she tries staying away from all those boards and blogs that get nasty. It just isn't worth my time to be honest - i like to use what precious time i do have on my scrapbooking (and other small smackerels )

For now - i'm off to do some un-Suzy things and then get back to work on this album.

School Pictures

sorry for the delay on posting yesterdays entry. i had a little technical problem. no matter.

I was going through a ton of photos my mother had given me a while back. Spent part of Monday and Tuesday scanning about 40 of them into my computer. It's not even a small dent in the pile but it's something I want to do for a few reasons. Many of the photos are very old. From the 1920's and some even older. Some of the pictures are newer but not very good quality (think early Polaroids) or are bent or torn. The ones that are a little damaged or fading - it just seems wise to do this so they are preserved. I'd also like to give each of my sisters a cd of the photos. I know they'd like having copies.

The scanning is very time consuming however. I can fit usually 4 photos on my scanner at a time but each photo needs its own entry if you will. I've created little files to cover each category (one for each family member, one for photos that show my siblings and me together - that kind of thing) and i will periodically save them to the external hard drive i got for Christmas. (I'd tried this scanning old photos before only to have all that time and work disappear into the void when i had a computer problem).

I picked some school photos of me to work on Tuesday. There don't seem to be too many so i decided one page would do it. At the top there's a handwritten title but what you can't see is that it opens up and there is a significant amount of journaling underneath. I used a piece of Foofala paper for the background, some Heidi Swapp journaling spots (i love those things) to label each photo and for the title block I used the antique ledger background stamp from Purple Onion Designs (kinda gives a library card look to it) and a pen.

Today is Wednesday so the topic is Family/Husband. I have some things to do this morning so I hope to work on that this afternoon. Maybe i'll have a chance to post something tonight.