27 September 2007

After years of living with cardboard boxes and file folders bulging with photos, clippings, programs, tickets, letters, and ultimately—memories, I finally have found a way to organize it that really seems to work for me.  This photo shows my new Scrapbooking Storage Units that I finally pulled out of the trailer and set up today.  I love them!

This summer, I discovered that Iris Inc., manufacturer of many wonderful storage items, is located less than five minutes from the Bristol Faire site.  Now, that would be nothing more than just interesting if it hadn’t been for one thing . . . it seems they have an annual warehouse clearance sale, where they actually invite the general public into their facility to take advantage of some wholesale pricing.  Oh boy—like a kid in a candy shop . . .

So, on a limited budget, I chose carefully, passing up many items in which I would have otherwise been very interested.  I picked up a couple of things to help with my living space there, and I bought these two wonderful scrapbook storage units.  I’d seen these in stores like Joann’s, and passed them up based on the retail price.  But, now that I’ve got two—I realize they’re worth the price.  And at the price I paid, they’re fabulous!

I set up one unit with nothing but my paper collection.  What makes these things really special for croppers, is that they are one of the few safe and practical ways to keep 12×12 inch papers.  I cannot tell you how many manufacturers make the insides of their drawers 11-3/4 inches!  Obviously not focusing on the scrapbooking market.  So, I’ve been storing my paper in a very cool rolling cropper bag, which I also love.  But, when I lugged that to a recent crop I realized just how freaking heavy it was!  I don’t need to take every piece of paper to a crop—I just need a good way to store and access every piece of paper whenever I do want it.  Now, I have that.

The other unit, I set up with a few of my current or future projects.  I have a wonderful old scrapbook I built for myself in 1981, that encapsulates my first eighteen years on this planet.  But, of course, that was years before the scrapbooking industry really came into its own, and concepts like “acid-free” began to dominate croppers motives.  In fact, it was years before anyone coined the word “cropping!”  So, it’s an old-fashioned style scrapbook—the pages are construction paper quality, the stuff is all glued in with rubber cement, and it needs to be rescued.  So, that’s a huge project, where I get to take that big album and make it into probably at least two new albums.  Then, there’s the TCU years; the rest of the eighties; the Kyle years, including all the renfaire stuff; and the book I want to do that’s all about our pets.  There’s the album I’ve envisioned that’s all about A Wardrobe in Time, complete with fabric swatches and design sketches and photos of all my big commissioned work.   There’s the book I must create that will be all about our June 2005 “Trip 2 Scotland.”  And, of course, there’s the birthday gift album I started for my brother a few years ago that tells the story of his first eighteen years—almost half finished since 2003.  I’ve never had all the stuff so accessible and so organized.   It’s practically begging me to work on it, now.  The hard part will be limiting my scrapbooking time so I can get some sewing done!

~MB

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