organising my albums

I've been working on my Project Life a lot lately and haven't been doing much ordinary scrapbooking.

Today I decided to do something that I've been meaning to do for quite some time - start to put all my layouts into three-ring binders.

Until now I've been using the "snap load" albums, which are expandable but you have to take them apart every time you want to put in a page. That starts to get painful after a while, unless you work out all the layouts you're going to do for that album put in exactly the right number of page protectors and then stick exactly to the plan, or things start to get messy.

This, for the uninitiated, is a snap load binding. It's a lot easier to use than a post screw binding.

Basically you just lift up those little tabs, pull the cover off the album, take out as many pages as you need to put the new page protector into the right place, and put it all back together again. One of these albums can hold a lot of pages. My largest is about 2.5 inches thick (and I just noticed tonight, the expandable spine has come loose from the rest of the album. I wonder how long it will stay together for.)

The only thing that was holding me back was the fact that I really like the look of double layouts in these albums, as opposed to the ring binder albums, because they have that uninterrupted look.

Exhibit A - snap load album

Exhibit B - ring binder album

See what I mean?

Of course I could keep all the double layouts in the snap load albums and put the singles into the ring binder, but that would upset my chronological sequence, and we can't have that!

So today I started to attack this shelf.

I transferred all of my 2009 layouts into two of these albums from Pioneer Photo Albums.

(Photo from a retail site that I now can't find again  . . .)

So this reduced the number of albums for 2009 from three to two, with a lot of room for more layouts.

The reason I started at 2009 is that it's the final year I used these albums. From 2010 I've been putting my layouts into my Project Life album so that the whole year is in one place.

I'm not sure what I'll use the 12 or so empty albums for. Probably some smaller projects where I do several layouts on one theme, like a holiday, or else random pages that don't really fit anywhere else.

I expect this will take a while, as I'll probably need about eight of these albums. And they might also become my Project Life binders for future years. If I haven't got them all by the end of the year, they might end up on my Xmas wish list.

And that was about the extent of any productive activity I did today. How was your Saturday?