Eiffel pages under way!

I've reached the part of my Paris album that I've been looking forward to since I started -- the Eiffel Tower section.

I have so many pictures that it's hard to decide which ones to use and which ones to weed out so the ones that make it in the book will have the most effect. I'm notorious for stretching what should be one or two tight, double-page layouts into four or five bloated ones -- I have a tendency to be repetitive. So I need to go through my tower photos and make some painful decisions about what stays and what goes in the interest of making the book as a whole the best it can be. Possible options for those leftover photos: framing, using on greeting cards or cropping for use on a collage page at the end of the book (this is an idea I got from my friend and fellow scrapper, Natalie). Or a trick I learned from my college best friend, Sara -- reducing photos to a smaller size, by way of Walgreen's collage prints (wwww.walgreens.com) so you can squeeze them in -- creatively and artistically, of course. ;-)

I'm close to finishing this album -- after the Eiffel Tower, I have one more small section and one single-photo page. Then I can start thinking about which project I want to tackle next. I want to do the Ivory Coast before we get too far removed from the trip, but I'm also feeling pulled toward the cupcake crawl and one of my projects with old pictures. I'm thinking the Ivory Coast would be a great project for winter, when it's cold and gray outside and I'll be in the mood to work on pages with colorful, tropical photos.

I'm feeling just inspired and motivated enough to tackle them one at a time -- and I really believe, at this point, anyway, that I can get it all done. By the time I'm 80, anyway ...