Just a few odds and ends to make sure get out there from the last week or so. These are things that don’t really need a full post, but I want to share with you anyways.

1. Look at my Punch Drunk Love Paper Pack getting some love over at The Daily Digi.

2. Arithmetic of Love also had some time in the sun!  It was featured in the New Release Highlights at Simple Scrapper.

3.  Check out my post about Beating the Winter Blues over at the Polka Dot Plum blog.

4.  I got FIVE layouts done over the course of the weekend!!!  Here’s a look at them.  You can see all the credits HERE.

5.  I will not have any New Releases this week.  I have been tying up some loose ends on a HUGE project, which I am *thisclose* to sharing with you.  In the meantime, you can check out all my Valentine kits and such HERE.

6.  A NEW newsletter went out earlier this week.  If you haven’t signed up for it, and would like to receive updates from me in your inbox, you can click the link on the side.  If you are signed up, and think that you’d rather not be at the time being, you can check out this link:

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7. Finally, the blog got a makeover last week!! I am looking to grow the blog and really talk about topics that are interesting to you, so that I can link them up in the sidebars. Look for a chance to share your ideas very very soon.

Well that’s all for now!! Watch for some new, interesting content this week!! With no new products to show, I’ll have to come up with something fun!!

Last week, I mentioned THIS blog post over at The Daily Digi.  In the post, Katie the Scrapbook Lady talked about a method that she has used for streamlining the scrapbooking experience.  Basically, you break the task of creating a layout into managable chunks, and then work on a series of layouts assembly line style.  Immediately, this idea stuck with me.  I am constantly looking for ways to scrapbook that don’t take a hour or two to do one layout.  With the other responsiblities in my life, I just don’t have the time.  So, I decided to give this approach a shot.

I won’t go into the specifics of the “how to” (you can click and read the blog post), but I will say that this was by far the easiest way I have completed 4 layouts in I can’t tell you how long.  It took me about a half hour to identify the pictures I wanted, edit them, and pick a template that went with the photos.  The problem was, at that point, I had to leave the computer for a bit…so I had to make mental notes of the photos I wanted to use and what templates I would use with them.  Later on in the day, I came back and picked out kits for each layout.  I actually wrote down the kit names this time, no more mental pictures.  This took me about 15 minutes.  I tend to be indecisive.  I think.  Maybe I’m not really indecisive though.  I don’t know.

When I came back to the layouts later that evening, I was able to start the assembly process.  I took the time and put each layout together, and then went back to do my journaling and to save the files as jpegs.  This took me a bit more time, about 45 minutes.  When I was done, I had 4 layouts completed and had spent only about an hour and a half on them.  These are the layouts:

Click on the layouts for the credits.

As you can see, the process worked well for me. What I did have trouble with, however, is keeping track of what I was going to use for each layout. In my paper days, I would have slipped everything into a folder and put it aside until I could work on it again. I could do that on my computer, but that would mean a whole lot of moving files, or copying files which would take up precious EHD space. Writing things down kept me organized, but I am such a visual person. I must say, I wrestled with this idea for the days following, and then it hit me. ACDSee!

With ACDSee Photo Manager 2009, I can tag items with multiple tags (which you may remember from my post about how I organize all my scrapbooking stuff). So what I could do is create a tag for each layout, and then tag the photos, the template, and the kit that I wanted to use. When it came time to work on the layout, I could hit the tag in ACDSee and everything would pop back up. I am trying this strategy out on a new set of layouts I am power scrapping.

Another issue I ran into while power scrapping, is editing photos. I will admit, I am bad with keeping up with my photo editing. As I have said before, since taking the Jessica Sprague photo editing class, I love editing photos…but I can’t seem to keep up with it. The biggest issue, I don’t edit as soon as I upload. If I could force myself to do that every time, I would be in a much better place. So this speedbump, totally my fault.

All in all, power scrapping worked really well for me. I was able to get four layouts done in a short amount of time, and was able to break that time up into chunks that worked for me. Right now, I am using power scrapping to work on our photos from Disney World last summer. I can’t wait to show you those!