since we're on the topic of my orderly nature...

I consider myself a semi-chronological scrapbooker. Most of the time I scrap whatever inspires me and don't worry about scrapping the photos that are "next." However, I do arrange my albums in chronological order. I like it that way; it makes me happy.

To further give order to my albums I do a calendar page for each month. These calendar layouts serve multiple purposes.
1.) They are an introduction to that section of the album.
2.) The calendars are a good representation of what when on in our lives for that month. (at least, when I fill them out in a timely manner and don't try to do 7 months at a time) I end up preserving lots of information and tidbits that would get lost otherwise. I might not do a page about how crazy busy I was this past April (and every April, for that matter!), but it will be quite obvious after one glance at the April calendar.
3.) Doing these gives me permission to leave things out of the rest of my album. It's recorded. I don't have to do a layout about it if I don't want to.
4.) The left page can be about a specific topic (like the July layout which focuses on my work at UNT), can be some photos I liked but didn't want to create a whole page for (like the June layout with some photos of me on my birthday), or can contain little bits and pieces of our life that month (like the March layout). It's extremely versatile and helps me get everything I want to include into my albums.

I created a calendar template in Microsoft Excel and just "save as" for each new month and fill in the info. It stays stored in my files until I'm ready to scrap it, which is good because I would never be able to fill these out if I waited. I'm all about simplicity in my scrapbooking, so I haven't altered the format much over the past years. I've seen other people do calendars on their layouts with individual cardstock squares for each day and it looked really cute, but it's just a little too time consuming for me. Plus, I like consistency. I'm just like that.

Even if you only do one, consider trying out a calendar page layout to get a lot of info into a single layout.





BTW, my original blog title was going to be "since we're on the topic of my Type A-ness," but after reading it I reconsidered. I'm a lady, after all. (Just not enough of one to make it stop me from sharing my inadvertent potty humor with the world.)