I love making albums and recently discovered that there is actually a method to my album-making madness:

I build my album two pages at a time.

That's it. And this ridiculously simple method works. Like magic.



First, it helps to break your album project down to small, manageable tasks. I feel a sense of accomplishment with every two pages that I finish and   that motivates me to keep going. And from a design standpoint, working with two pages - treating the left and right pages as a collective - helps to ensure that they are cohesive and will flow well together.

This approach works whether you are building a new album from scratch or trying to corral your layouts into an album (one that looks aesthetically pleasing and has a semblance of order). No small task if your layouts are   anything like mine - a lovely collection of mish mosh eclecticness.

I think most  of us are in this mish mos boat together? We don't scrapbook chronologically, we don't use the  same kits over and over again, and  to make things extra mish-moshy, we also like to experiment with different styles and try new artistic techniques. Hence, we end up with a collection of great pages that don't necessarily match.

And I rather like it that way. I like being able to treat a new layout as an individual art project. I don't want to worry about how it will coordinate with the last layout I  made and how it will  look in a book. If I get caught up in those  details, it would take all the fun out of scrapbooking (you know, the creative freedom part) and I'd probably never get any pages done.

What  I wasn't so wild about was taking the daunting task of organizing this eclectic-ness. So I put it off and put it off and then put it off some more. Then one day, I was staring at the photo collage on my wall:


I like the way the layouts look next to photos. Why not use the layout + photo format to make the album?







click to see entire album

For more album ideas, please visit my blog.

Download this layered template for free from my paislee press shop and give this approach a try. Happy album building!



download template

Giveaway

I'm sponsoring a giveaway for a $10 gift coupon to my paislee press shop! To enter for your chance to win, simply post a comment below before Friday, May 28th at 11:59pm  (PST) to enter. You can get an extra chance to win if you tweet/facebook/blog this. Be sure to come back and post links to your tweet/facebook/or blog as a new comment entry for EACH thing you do. ONE winner will be drawn at random and announced shortly after the contest closes.