This is your life -- in scrapbooks

Hi there. My name's Mandy, and I'm a scrapaholic. I think I always had the seed inside of me -- even back in grade school, when my idea of a photo album was a flip book where I put my pictures and maybe a ticket stub or receipt. By college, I was using the sticky, peel-back albums, and I was saving all types of memorabilia to include with whatever pictures I had taken. I thought I was so clever because I angled the photos on the pages. Can we say "thinking out of the box"?! Ha!

My first "real" scrapbook was a spiral notebook I bought at a shop in New York City when I was there on vacation with a couple of my coworkers in 2001. I thought it was the coolest thing when I found it -- divided into sections, it had lined pages, blank pages, pocket pages and graph paper pages. It even had pages that looked like they were specially designed for writing music. If I knew anything about writing music, I SO would have filled those pages with my own ode to the Big Apple.

As it turned out, I used the book to keep a daily journal of the trip, and when I got home and developed my pictures (I was still film in '01 and didn't go digital until midway through 2004), I taped them onto the blank pages, behind the journaling. The pictures were mostly dark and grainy, and I didn't have a single embellishment, but the mere combination of photos and journaling were the foundation of what my scrapbooking would eventually turn into.

Now I'm thinking about all those old albums -- especially the peel-back ones, which are starting to yellow -- and I'm seriously contemplating how to approach a massive scrapbooking project that would entail getting all of those photos into brand-new, acid-free scrapbooks. It will take years, if I even make a dent before life brings some kind of challenge or surprise that tears me away. I've started going through photo boxes full of extra copies from the days of free doubles at Walgreens, and I'm formulating ideas for how to break them up into chunks that I could scrap one at a time without feeling completely overwhelmed. Nothing appeals to me more than having shelves full of colorful albums neatly labled with their subject matter, telling the story of my life up to this point, and even a sampling of my parents' story based on old pictures my mom has given me over the years. I'd love to create a collection that my husband Camille's and my eventual children could look at one day -- not to mention being able to enjoy them over and over again myself.

So I've started the sorting, the brainstorming and the list-making. Next up is picking a subject and finding the time to start the first book. I have a weeklong staycation coming up in September, and my plan is to really dig into the sorting then, and try to get as many pictures out of the old albums as possible. I just need to make sure I file them chronologically and write names and dates on as many as I can so that once I get around to doing the books, I'll have all the information I need right at hand. Why, oh why didn't I write on the backs of ALL my pictures when I developed them? Oh well. What's done is done.

If anyone reading this has undertaken a similar massive project, I'd love any tips you might be able to offer. Thanks in advance, and happy scrapping!