The Memory Bee

A Jello Book Class!

What, you might ask, is a Jello book? That is what I'm calling the little books that I am making out of Jello boxes! It's addicting and so easy and fun. I'm excited to teach it as a class on Sunday, April 25, at 1pm Eastern time on Zoom. It will be a little different type of class because I will be demonstrating how to make a small and a large Jello book in the class, and then you can gather your supplies and make your own as you rewatch the recording of the class. If you can't join me live that day, you can just watch the recording, pause and follow the directions (and the pdf of the directions in English, French*, or Italian**) as you go through the video. You can find more information and the class supply list on the class website HERE and you can sign up in my online shop HERE.

*Ce cours sera dispensé en langue anglaise mais les instructions seront disponibles en plusieurs langues : anglais, français et italien. **Questo corso si terrà in lingua Inglese, ma avrà le istruzioni in Inglese, Francese ed Italiano.

I hope you'll join me on April 25th or sign up and receive the recording of the live class to watch anytime. I think you'll be inspired! They are addicting!

March 23 Part 4 Photo organization final results

Welcome to the final (at least for now!) installment of my photo organizing process with a look at where my photos are now. Just another reminder of where I began...

And where I ended up... (If you want to go back and read, you can find Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 at the links.)

Almost all the photos that aren't already in a scrapbook are in these 4 file drawers. I brought the drawers from my office, where they were kept under a counter and not easily accessible, to a shelf in my class kit room, where I plan to keep it. I plan to put labels in the holders on the front. (Beside it are the photos in boxes I'll describe below. They'll be gone this spring when I see people that I'm sharing them with.)

I used these two 2 drawer steel file drawers to store the photos by categories. These are the drawers if you are interested: Steel 4x6" file drawers. There are no more photo albums with photos in them except this one on the top with before and after home remodeling photos in it, which are staying in there for now. Beside that are a few 5x7" photos that don't fit in the drawers.

A look in each drawer shows how I ended up organizing the photos. I made the dividers by cutting white cardstock to 6" x 4 3/4" and used a tab from another divider to trace the tab to cut out with scissors. I cut several at a time, so it wasn't too difficult to do.

In this first drawer you can see how I've grouped family photos... Because so many photos are already scrapbooked by events through the years, I thought that grouping by people would be a good way to separate them and make it easier to find a photo that someone might be looking for.

This drawer has photos from various vacations...

More divisions here...

And more vacations here... (Many of these already have scrapbooks, too. The sections with more photos haven't been scrapbooked yet.)

Here are a few other places where I have some photos... in this wooden box I keep the 3x3" photos that I've had printed over the years by Foxprints - mostly from Instagram posts. They have been divided like this since I've had them printed so I didn't do anything with these. I keep this little box on my desk.

The next two boxes are one for Brandon (on the left) and one for Jeremy (on the right.) I made more dividers for these photos and arranged them by years. I'll have them go through the boxes and decide what they want to keep and then I'll keep what I want. (Many of these are doubles of what are already in scrapbooks.) I never did baby or toddler scrapbooks for either boy, so there are lots of those photos that are very special to me.

Next, in the box on the left are Christmas photos divided by year going back to when I was a little girl. I have a Christmas scrapbook that starts in about 1982, but these are some from before that and after about 2004. I'll keep those separate until I do something with them. The box on the right holds photos that I have to give to family members to go through.

One little drawer holds the old photos of me when I was little and are divided by year in baggies. I still need to go through and reorganize these, and I'd love to put them in an album of some kind. It's manageable though in this little drawer.

I put all the portrait photos in an envelope and still need to go through those because there are too many copies of some of them.

I've thrown away tons of photos (and even a couple scrapbooks of things that I didn't need to keep anymore) - photos that were blurry, lots of doubles of photos (I used to always get doubles when my photos were printed), and photos of things and places that no one cares about anymore.

I've come a long way from this... no more drawers filled with photos totally unorganized, no more photo albums with photos all mixed together, no more photo storage boxes crammed full of photos... now if I want to find a specific photo, I can easily do it. I'll live with this system for now and see how it works. It's been really fun to look back at our life and see all the good times with our little family and with extended family.

I've loved hearing from all who have been inspired to tackle your own photos by my process. It was a big, hard job, but it feels so good to have it done! Let me know if you have any questions!

March 21 Photo Organization Part 3

Yikes! It's been over a month since I posted here! I'm going to bring you up to date with my photo organization process that began back in January. If you'd like to go back and reference those posts, you can find them here: Part 1 and Part 2. At the end of Part 2 I was so totally overwhelmed by the mess and the huge amount of photos, photos albums, and scrapbooks, that I didn't touch it for almost two months. I just couldn't face it. Luckily it was in my class kit room and since I was waiting for new supplies for classes to arrive, I had the luxury of just closing the door and not dealing with it, BUT now I need the table for new classes, so it was time to face it. I worked on it everyday for about about two weeks and kind of figured it out as I went along since I didn't know what the plan was going to be, but it's pretty much done!

This next photo is a reminder of a small part of what I started with. The four drawers, photo storage boxes, albums were filled with photos without organization and very hard to access under the counter in my office where I stored them.

I took everything out from every corner and shelf and under the bed, etc and put it in the class kit room. Ugh!

I began sorting photos into piles by families, trips, people, etc, filling three shelves and the table top. At this point I was throwing away any photos that were definitely ones I didn't want to keep.

Here's sneak peak at the finale!! The table is clear and it's the best feeling of accomplishment to have this under control. I'll share a closer look at the final solutions in the next post very soon.

So what did I do with all those scrapbooks? The scrapbook albums from 1994 to 2001 are on the top of this shelf (there is a book end so they don't fall over!) I still had photos on one shelf at this point.

Family vacation albums are on the shelf in the nearby closet...

Finished mini albums are on this bottom shelf.

That left me with room to keep sorting photos. I removed every photo from every album and continued with my piles...

I still had one shelf of photo piles but it was down from three shelves so that felt good!

I sorted photos to give to family members...

I sorted photos with just my husband in it, with just me in it, with the boys individually and together, family group photos, houses we've lived in, pet photos, trips, and more - you'll see the groupings in the next post's photos.

Once I had the photos of the boys sorted and in a separate box for them to go through, I sorted theirs by years. It wasn't easy because many of the photos weren't dated. Ugh again! I used sticky notes for the years and then grouped them. For the photos that were undated I tried to match outfits or luckily was able to use Brandon's distinctive hairstyles through the years to help match them to the correct year. Many of these photos are already in scrapbooks, so I'm not sure how many of these they will actually want to keep - probably just the best ones.)

I even used his school scrapbook to help identify the year of the photos.

I put them back in the box by year and then used actually dividers by years in the finished box. I'll share a photo of that in the next post soon.

After everything was sorted, I really struggled with how they were going to be stored. I ordered three different photo albums from Amazon, thinking that having three or four photo albums with all the photos in them would work, but these albums hold 1,000 photos and are very heavy empty. I wondered how many people would want to look through a 1,000 photo album to find a particular photo of something. Not me!

This was the album I liked best (here is the link, if you're interested) but all the albums I ordered have already been returned.

I know the suspense will be killing you LOL but I'll show you the final solution in the next post.

Now I have a box of all the empty photo albums...

And empty photo storage boxes and bag of photo holders - all empty!!

I hope this helps with ideas of how to get your photos under control and more accessible. I signed up for a "how to organize your old photos" class and thought that the $39 fee was reasonable, but the video lesson on how to organize your photos was literally 3 minutes! I was so aggravated but it made me more determined to share my thought process and progress with everyone here - for free!

Thanks for following along and hope you are staying well! I'll be back on Tuesday with the final installment.

Love, Debby xoxo