Christmas Cropping

I realized that I could move the carousel downstairs and spend time with DH as we watched Christmas movies. I spent a good chunk of Christmas day cropping photos and putting the date the photo was taken on the back. We don't have many photos from February (DH had a Horrible Cold) and June. I don't know what happened then. Nothing camera worthy, that's for sure.

I have printed out almost one year's worth of photos and the carousel isn't half full. I didn't print out all the photos from any event, just one or two of my favorites from each. Those 4x6 pockets are going to be horribly difficult for me to fill. Mostly because the photographer in me doesn't want to crop a photo down small enough to fit on a layout that size.

The Future is Now

I scrap so that some future generation can have some memories of things that happened years ago. I have just had it pointed out how things that you don't think are that important can become very important to someone years down the road. My BIL had made a video of my niece's elementary school graduation celebration. He was probably playing with one of his geek toys. It's in digital format. He found it recently and he's sending out copies.

This will be the only recording I've got of my parent's voices.

200+ Pages?!?!

The reason you are not seeing photos of completed carousels all over the place is quite simple. These are a BIG project. You aren't going to complete one in a short time. I have spent two pleasant evenings working on mine, and I have 0.5% of it complete. Perhaps. It is probably because I'm doing complete layouts for each page, with journaling and embellies. But I'm using my stash!

Come to think of it, I've seen only two photos of completed carousels; one was filled with a card collection and the other was a baby album made before the baby was born, with no photos. Hmmm..... But the baby album did give me a couple of ideas for pages that I'd like to include. I've got to track down chipboard, though.

Carousel Information

I went out on the web looking for information on the 7 Gypsies Photo Carousel and couldn't find much, other than ads. However, I have information now! Thanks to a teaching friend of mine and my own experimentation, I now know that:

The idea is to fill the carousel to the point that the center metal portion is not visible when you part the pages to look at a pair of them.

Filling the carousel will take anywhere from 75 to over 100 page protectors, depending on how thick your layouts are. That would be twice that number in finished pages or 150 to over 200 layouts. It can hold a lot of stuff!

A partly filled carousel is tippy and off balance. You can easily add pages, but moving them around isn't always easy. There are ridges to keep the pages from slipping on the clips as you spin. Squishing pages together to add a clump can be tricky.

The larger page protectors are designed to hold the 7 Gypsies clear stamp sheets, but they will work on the photo carousel and hold a 5.5" x 7" layout. That's portrait dimensions, not landscape.

Using layout ideas for 8.5 x 11 pages works well for these pages. The proportions aren't the same, so you can't simply scale down. Just use the general idea.

I have been printing my photos 2-up on a 5" x 7" piece of photo paper and they are a good size for a layout using the larger page protectors.

It is a very good and useful thing to have ribbons, tabs and other decorative pieces stick beyond the page protectors. It becomes very difficult to find anything if you don't. You get lost going around and around.

Since I'm using the clear stamp pages and not the 4 x 6 photo pages, most of the 7 Gypsies 97% finished items, like the calendar pages with tabs or their pre-cut chipboard, are too small. I need to cut my own out of manila folders or chipboard.

I need to allow at least 15" x 15" of flat area to display my finished carousel, and to look impressive it needs more like 20" x 20". It will occupy most of my square coffee table. It will not fit on the average bookshelf, not even with part of pages extending beyond the shelf. If I were using only the 4 x 6 pages, the finished carousel would be much smaller, needing only 12" x 12" of space at a minimum.

The Latest Project

I got one of the 7 Gypsies Photo Carousels. I think it will be a great addition to our family room, and be something on the coffee table that is not clutter. But I'm struggling with designing layouts for the different sized pages and with figuring out how many pages it is going to take to fill it. I've got one of the special shaped hole punches for it, so I can create my own pages. There are pocket pages, there are calendar pages, there are all sorts of pages I could buy, but I'm trying not to shop like crazy for this thing. I want to create the pages for myself out of the paper that I already have.

Disney Video!

Everyone should know how much I love Disney. Well, Disney loves me back.

Taking Stock

I was thinking about how much I have done in the two years I've been doing scrapbooking. I started counting up finished albums. I've completed 18 albums and at least 6 mini books/albums. It could be more mini books. I don't remember them all.

But, if each album has 35-40 pages in it, I've completed at least 650 pages since I started scrapping. It doesn't feel like I've made that many, but I guess I have. And that isn't counting the digital layouts.

I had been feeling badly about the size of my stash. When I counted up inches of cardstock and patterned paper, I could complete an estimated 500 pages with the paper that I have in my studio right now. I had been thinking that I'd be scrapping for many years to come with the paper that I collected in a fairly short time.

I no longer feel nearly as bad about the size of my stash. I know that in one year, I could use up more than half of it. Let's see what happens in 2009.