Organizing Your Scrapbooking Ideas

Are you overwhelmed with scrapbooking idea books, magazines, and sketches? Keeping all your scrapbooking ideas organized and in one place seems impossible. Follow these tips to get your ideas under control.

Get rid of what you don't use.

If you haven't opened any of your idea books in over a year, it's time to get rid of them. Sit down and read through them one more time. If there are any ideas you think you might actually use, make a photocopy, or a quick sketch, then get rid of the book.

Do the same with your magazines, if you have the time. Tear out any pages with ideas you want to use and recycle the magazines, or pass them on to another scrapbooker. If you have too many magazines to sit and go through them, just get rid of them. To get a handle on your magazines in the future, tear out pages with ideas you like as you read.

Sort through sketches you've printed off the internet and get rid of any you've tried that didn't work, or that you know you won't use.

Find an organization system that works for you.

If your organizational system isn't one you use, then you need a new one. If you won't utilize a system, you can't use your ideas and there's no point in saving them.

There are several different methods that may work for organizing your scrapbooking ideas. First of all, there is the binder organizational system. Use a binder to hold pages torn from magazines, sketches printed from the internet, and other papers with scrapbooking ideas. Use page dividers with tabs to sort your ideas. Label the tabs with things like "cards," "layout sketches," "theme ideas," "layout ideas," "altered projects," "colors," "embellishments," "titles," "journaling," or whatever works for you.

An idea similar to the binder idea is using file folders to organize your scrapbooking ideas. File folders work better than a binder if you have a lot of scraps of paper around, rather than whole sheets which would fit in a binder. Sort your ideas and label each folder according to topic, using the ideas above, or your own.

Another option for sorting your scrapbooking ideas is to display them. This works well if you have a limited number of sketches, or layout ideas on paper, if you want to see all your ideas and be inspired, or if you quickly use your ideas and remove them. A display system works well for quickly rotating ideas. Use a bulletin board, magnet board or just your wall to tack or tape up pieces of paper with your ideas above your workspace. All your ideas gathered from magazines and the internet will be in your field of vision, ready to inspire you.

Revisit occasionally.

Go through your organizational system every once in a while. Make sure it is still working for you, and remove any ideas you have tried, pages you no longer need, or things you have changed your mind about and will never use. This purge will also help you discover ideas you loved, but have forgotten about.