Scrapbooking 10 minutes at a time

I scrap every day in varying amounts. If I'm lucky, I have no papers to grade, my boys fall asleep immediately (wouldn't THAT be great--can you imagine!), and no pressing needs come up, so I can get a couple hours of scrapping done before bed. When the school year is in full swing and my boys are--well, acting like themselves--then I can maybe get 10 minutes here and there.

I've gotten adept at using those ten minutes well. Here's a page I made over the past week where I purposefully only scrapped it 10 minutes at a time, taking pictures along the way so that I could share my process. The photo was not a great one--just a drawing and a book my son had on the kitchen floor--but the story was one I wanted to preserve: this book is the same book that I used to draw from as a child, Ed Emberley's Make a World, if you're curious. Here goes:

Step 1: Select products.

Like I said, the photo wasn't great, so I wanted some bright, fun colors and artsy products to highlight the story. I pulled various products from my September Studio Calico kit that I thought would work, spread them out, and just looked at them as I passed by over the next day.

Step 2: Make preliminary design decisions

 

I decided to use a neutral background and layer some bright colors on it as a photo mat. I trimmed those photos and played around with photo placement and imagined techniques I might try. (I didn't end up stitching, but I kept this template out to imagine what it would look like if I did. I finally decided no.)

Step 3: Get crafty

 

Though I love the Fancy Pants Designs letter stickers, I used them to mask the title when I misted. (It utterly KILLED me to have to throw away this A, R, and T after I misted. Those are the letters I run short on!) I used my Cameo spatula to pry the letter stickers off after I misted, and this is how it looked on the page:

  

Step 4: Journal

(I forgot to take a picture of this step! Rats.) I was going to print the journaling in kraft and cut it in strips, sort of a tone-on-tone design. Unfortunately, this kraft is lighter than most, and I don't have any that matches, so I had to scrap that idea (pun intended). Instead, I measured lines in pencil, journaled on them in ink, then used ink to trace over the lines freehand.

Step 5: Play around with embellishment possibilities

 

I love to embellish, so I pulled stuff from my stash as well as the kit and lay them near the page, just so I could imagine  what it would look like.

Step 6: Finish the page

 

I machine stitched in a couple places, then created two embellishment clusters by the photo and along the bottom. Here are the details:

And there's my page that I made 10 minutes at a time! I'm satisfied with it. I had fun making it, and it tells the story I wanted to tell. I hope this gives you ideas of how to fit scrapbooking into your life, even if it's in 10 minute increments!