What's good for the Gander is good for the Goose

I was looking at all the starting points for my husband's family history albums last Friday, and I was proud of the progress I'd made, but at the same time, I felt guilty that I hadn't even started my own family albums.  About 5 years ago, I went through all the family pictures at my grandmother's house, and pulled out all the ones that I wanted to scan and use in scrapbooking.  Needless to say, that didn't happen.  I think that the main obstacle was that I thought that I needed to scan the photos first.

Once I had conceptualized how I planned to do Alfred's album, I figured it would be really easy to get mine done too...if only I didn't have to scan the pictures. I really felt like I wanted to get this album done though. (How could I do it for his family and not mine?) I thought, all of my supplies are archival quality.  Why do I have to scan the pictures?  So, I didn't.  

Friday evening at 8 pm I sat down with half of the Sundrifter collection pad and the whole Snippets collection pack (both from Studio Calico) and a stack of cardstock for backgrounds.  I used Shimelle Laine's system from her class "The Perfect Collection" and just started cutting up the papers (I did pull out a few papers I thought I'd want to use as whole background sheets). 

Once I'd cut up all the patterned paper, I put all the background papers and cardstock into page protectors.  I went to my shoebox of pictures and pulled all the ones that had a story that I wanted to tell right away and slipped them in the page protectors with backgrounds that seemed to go with the pictures (although most of my cardstocks were pretty neutral so they weren't too hard to match). 

Next I went to that huge pile of scraps I'd produced and picked a few scraps to work with for each picture/set of pictures in the page protectors.  I stopped there at midnight.  That's right, by midnight I had all my starting points kitted up for all of the pictures I'd pulled and had them in page protectors to work on at my leisure. But then, the kids went to bed on Saturday night and again on Sunday night (as kids sometimes do), and working from bedtime to midnight each day I eeked out a total of 12 hours from Friday night to bedtime on Sunday.  

I got every single one of those kits done up to gluing down all the paper layers and the pictures.  I'm looking at the pile right now and I still can't believe it.

I posted pictures of the whole album up to starting points here, but these are just a few examples of what I did with each of the pages so far.

I can't tell you how excited I am to have these pictures in a form that makes them easy to flip through with my girls.  It came together so quickly, that now I think I'm going to do something a little involved for the journaling.  Thanks requests from some of the ladies on the TwoPeasinaBucket.com forum, they're all photographed and in my flikr, so why not get my whole family's take on the pictures?

The plan is to find a time when everybody can be online (the hardest part of this plan), and virtually flip through the scrapbook.  I'll record the conversation and use pieces of it for the journaling on the layouts and include the whole conversation on mp3 cd in the album.  

I can't wait until everyone is back from their respective vacations in a couple of weeks so we can schedule this event.  This book is going to be awesome!