Scrappin' away

So, on a certain 101 in 1,001 list, there is a little line next to #75 that says Print out photos and make a photo album for 2011. 

2011 was a wonderfully full year: two marathons, two out-of-state weddings, two trips to Colorado, and lots of family events back in Minnesota. It also marked the year that I started blogging and thus started taking a zillion times more photos than I ever had before.  I was scared, though, that they would sit for eternity, in various little pockets of Picasa - or even if I did manage to print them out, in little photo packages all over my apartment.

What to do?  Imagine my surprise when my mom suggested that, for my birthday present, we could take a weekend in March for her to teach me how to scrapbook!

Now, she would deny this, but she is a scrapbooking queen.  She has been doing it for ages and has this magnificent eye for creating beautiful books.  I classify myself as a feeble, few-frills newcomer.  Could I be taught?

First, we went to Joann Fabrics to get all of our gear.  She helped me pick out a little photo-cutter, pretty packs of paper, markers, and this fab tape contraption that makes taping pictures way easier.

Later that night, we started cropping all of my photos - and as I learned later, that wasn't even the half of the cropping I'd do.  Cropping is pretty important and magical because it obviously helps you squeeze more photos onto each page.

I should note that we found inspiration from one of the original great scrapbookers: my grandma.  My parents have loads of her scrapbooks from her travels with my grandpa.  I flipped through two of them, and they are meticulously organized with pamphlets and photos and tickets from every landmark they visited.  They are awesome.

And huge. Once more:

 
Anyway, here's Mom and me, scrappin' away.  I like to think that my dad was loving this scene.  I also like that we have water bottles near us.  It kind of shows the rigor of the epic project being undertaken.

 
I had a lot of photos that I wanted to cram into one book, so I wasn't much for making ornate pages containing one photo with lots of decorations around it.  I think what I was doing was somewhere between beginning scrapbooking and introductory collage-making.

It was great fun to sort and organize my photos with my mom by my side.  (She was working on her own albums.)  She saw photos she hadn't seen before and we got to talk about each event. She also provided invaluable guidance and even encouraged me to branch out and try making some photos into ovals instead of just squares and rectangles!

And somewhere in between wondering if I'd get into it and looking at the finished product, I began to love each page.  The colors!  The photos!  The people!  Each page makes me all-out grin.

I could not ever pick a favorite.  Plus, it's not like you haven't already seen loads of these exact pictures in various posts through the year.  But here are a few beloveds:

Nat's wedding weekend!

Family birthdays and parties:

Our trip to the San Juan Islands:

And my trip to Vermont!

By Sunday evening, I had a book that was very large but not quite as packed as my grandma's scrapbook - a (somewhat) succinct summary in photos of 2011: my neighborhood, my family, my friends. Major thanks to both of my parents for such a fun weekend - and to my mom for dreaming up this project!

Consider #75 checked off my list!  I have the feeling, though, that won't be my last adventure in scrapbooking.