These are all filled with wonderful layout ideas for not only scrapbooking, but cardmaking, gifts, home decor projects and more. There's nothing more frustrating than knowing you have the perfect idea stashed away in a magazine but then not being able to find it. Idea organization can be very simple if you just provide yourself with a good system.
Let's talk about Magazine Ideas first.
Scrapbooking magazines are expensive. For some of us the idea of tearing up something we've just paid $6-$8 for is a little more than we can stomach. However, that's exactly what I'm going to tell you to do. No matter how organized you believe you are with your 25 sticky notes sticking out the side of your magazines, you just can't simplify your system with out removing the pages/ideas from your publications and reorganizing them into a better system.
One of the things that works absolutely the best with magazine layout ideas is filing them right in with the scrapbooking materials they will be used with. For those of you lucky enough to be using a ScrapRack, this process is really simple. Just remove the idea from the magazine, flip to the correct section of your ScrapRack and file the idea with your scrapbook products. I've included an example below. You can see in the lower right hand corner of this ScrapRack storage page, there's a folded layout for a Baseball themed page.
Now, when I go to work on a Baseball page, I'll see the layout idea, and I'll also see the products I have available to complete the page. The other nice thing about filing your ideas right with your products, is that when you go to the Scrapbook store to buy additional products, you can just take the Baseball Section off your ScrapRack, Velcro it into your TravelPack and when you get to the store you'll have all of your products and your design idea so you'll be able to buy the things you need without having to guess what you have at home.
Another easy way to manage your magazine layout ideas is to start a notebook, much like the notebook you may have in your kitchen for recipes and other household information. Fill the notebook with dividers and 8.5 x 11 page protectors. Label the dividers to correspond with the categories in your 4 Section System of Supply organization. Now, as you pull ideas out of your magazines, you can slip them right into page protectors in your notebook. You can take the notebook with you to crops or just keep it at home for easy reference.
What about ideas you see on the internet?
This is what "Scrap-Lifting" is all about. Start a file on your computer for ideas. Inside that file, put other files labeled for each of the categories in your 4 Section Organization System (read about the 4 Section System - click here, Watch a brief video about it - click here)
When you come across a design idea on the internet, click to enlarge the image if possible, then copy and paste it into the appropriate folder in your computer. when you need ideas for that particular theme, you can open the file folder and browse by design subject. When you find the one you want to use, you either keep it open on your computer (if you're working at home) or you can print it out and take it with you to the crop.
What if you know exactly which pictures you want to use with that particular
layout idea?
If the idea is in a magazine you can always just pull it out and put it with the pictures. If the image is online, and you're not ready to print the pictures yet, just copy and paste the image of the layout idea right into the file folder where you have your pictures stored. If you want to be able to get back to that image on it's original website, you can either Hyperlink it to the picture, or just copy and paste the URL into the "tag" box on the picture. (If you have questions about either of these procedures email me or comment on this blog and I'll get back to you with details and "how-to"s.) In either case, you'll have the layout idea right with the pictures, exactly where you need it.
