A dull scrapbooking post about altering page protectors

A bummer of a title,but I am super proud that I managed to make this work and I wanted to share it with you. Be warned, though: only pictures of page protectors--no pretty photos on this post!

I have mentioned before that I like to make my vacation albums 8.5x11 potbound. (Side note--my computer keeps changing "postbound" to "potbound." I hope I caught and edited all of them, but in case I missed one, please know I'm not referring to drugs!) Those albums are pretty hard to find nowadays. I LOVED the Stampin' Up! 8.5x11 postbound albums, but they discontinued them years ago. Sadly. As a substitute, I bought a few of these on clearance at Archiver's years ago:

I didn't buy any extra page protectors, though, which is something I've since learned: just like when I buy a stamp pad I always get the refill, now when I buy an album, I always get extra page protectors too.

In this case, I had used one album to scrap my Disney vacation. To scrap that vacation, which needed tons of page protectors, I raided the second album that I had bought for some of its page protectors, which left this album a little thin for the Custer State Park vacation I was going to use it for. When I checked my supplies, I had two different kinds of  page protectors:

On the left are Stampin' Up! extras--a lot of them--and on the right are the 4 leftover ones from the album itself. The problem?

When you lay them on top of each other, the album protectors are a hair shorter on the right than the SU ones. Damn. (On a side note, I just noticed that you can see me in the page protector--apparently I was wearing a purple shirt when I took this photo.) Since page protectors are pretty sturdy, I decided to be crafty and make the album page protectors a little longer on the right.

I had 4 album page protectors, but I only needed 2 for the album, so I cut the left edge off two and sewed them onto the other two, making them a little wider on the left:

After I did this and laid them on top of the SU page protectors, voila! It all lined up.

I suppose it didn't really matter that they didn't line up on the right, but I'm fairly type A and knew it would drive me crazy when I looked through the album. As a result, I decided it was worth the effort to try to even them up.

I did manage to edit and print the photos from this vacation before the summer was done, so I will be finished with this album within the next month. I'll share it once I'm done!

Same photos, different albums

In my last post, Artemis asked me about where my layouts go, specifically when I use the same photos on different layouts. Let me use the Sculpture Garden photos as an example.

I took a lot of photos, many good ones, at that outing. So I printed a lot, some of them enlarged. After I got them from the printer, I pulled one photo out and did a layout with it right away:

This one went in my son's album.

Next, I pulled my favorites and put together a two-pager for the family album:

While I was narrowing the photos for that layout, I noticed many of them involved my boys climbing, so I made this layout next, again for the family album.

I still had many great photos left. I blogged about the genesis for the next layout in this post, making this page about what it mean to be a mother of boys. Here is the layout:

I ended up putting that layout in my album.

Finally, I used remaining photos for a layout to put in my older boy's album, the layout I showed yesterday.

So I don't make it a point to use up all my photos, but this event created many stories for me, so I made many layouts using most if not all of the photos.