Project Wish List: Scrapbooks

I always have multiple project ideas swimming about in my head. Here's a nice long list for myself and for your amusement.

Scrapbooks I have supplies for:

1. Halloween book
This is a smaller book that would feature pumpkin photo and a costume photo from every year. Eventually, you will be able to flip through it and enjoy a fast forward experience of the annual festivities.

2. Christmas book
This is the same concept as the Halloween book although I am not quite sure how to narrow it down a far as which photos go in it every year.

3. Teacher book
I want to put together photos from Chad's teaching career, primarily the lovely annual school photo and then whatever additional odds and ends accumulate.

4. Old-fashioned scrapbook
I have decided to compile all the photos of friends and family that arrive at Christmas time into a large miscellaneous kind of book. This will also be the place where I keep copies of newspaper articles or announcements that relate to our family.


Scrapbooks (or photo books) I have in mind:

1. Grandma Bev's life
I know my Aunt Amy has all the photos in her basement and has talked about doing a book. It's a daunting project – after all, it would be her entire life – but I think it would be cool to do. I would love to have her siblings help write stories and captions to go with her childhood and for my grandfather, my father, my aunt, and my uncle to do the same for photos from her marriage and the time when their children were young. Sadly, I am not sure how much us grandchildren will remember. Some things for sure, and I think photos might help trigger memories. Anyway, this book would be kind of a family project. Maybe it should be a series of books. What could you fit in one – a decade? Two? All the images are pre-digital cameras so it would have to be the kind of scrapbook where you stick in the photos or there would be a whole lot of scanning involved if it was going to be done online.

2. Christmas ornament book
I think of this as being a small little book with close-up photos of individual ornaments. The page could have a caption or the opposite page on the spread could have a short little story. I think of making this kind of book for my husband's grandmother, who has several old ornaments with stories. I also think of doing this book for my Grandma Helen. Most of her ornaments came from travels. I can picture the ornament image on the left side of the page and a beautiful landscape on the right side of the page.

3. 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
That's where I left off in the scrapbook world. I like to imagine these being like yearbooks of our life as a family. My daughter was born in 2008 but I recently finished a book that encompassed her first year of life so it seems like starting there would feel repetitious, at least right now. I obviously can't keep up on doing regular scrapbooking so I am interested in doing the books online through Snapfish or Blurb.com. I just haven't tried it yet. I am not intimidated by doing page layouts. I do that every day for my job. So really, this shouldn't be all that difficult! There are some pretty interesting vacations in a few of those years (the Florida Keys and Boston) so it would be fun to get those photos in book form.

4. When I was 1...
I would also like to make a set of books that are child-specific that the child can have for themselves. Right now, as my daughter is a toddler, I frame those in terms of age: "When I was 1..." or "When I was 2..." But as she enters school it seems like it would make sense to have them follow the school year. I think the key to success with these books (which I picture as little squares for some reason) and with the so-called yearbooks, is to do them a few years after the fact. Then you are much less attached to every photo and able to edit things down.