Organizing Your Hobbies

For a hobby that's meant to be fun, scrapbooking can sometimes seem like serious business. Get into it enough and you may feel like you spend most of your time digging through your supplies for that special piece of paper or combing through a heap of photos for that birthday party picture you just knew you "left in here someplace."

The prospect of combing through all your stickers or starting a page that you know may get stained by your child's dirty hands before you have a chance to finish may be enough to scare you away from your project.

If you want to make your scrapbook experience fun again, you have to devote some of your time to organizing. This necessary requirement isn't as daunting as it sounds. It can even be part of the fun. If you look at it in one light, figuring out the best way to store and manage your supplies and photos uses the same creative brain muscles you flex to make a scrapbooking page.

Okay, maybe that's stretching it a little, but the point is that organization isn't as bad as it may sound after you figure out how much of it you need to do. As you consider the organization method that works best for you, keep the following factors in mind:

• Space: The amount of space you have to work in makes all the difference in determining how many supplies you can have on hand and how often you'll need to replace them.

• Time: Do you scrapbook once a year, once a month, once a week, daily, or hourly? Knowing your standard frequency goes a long way toward determining how many supplies you need to buy and how much space you have to work in.

• Buying habits: The amount of supplies you buy should be determined by the space you have to work in and the time you have to do it -- not by those catchy accessories you simply must have.

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