Happy Monday.  The day is almost over though.  Kida has a ballet performance in a bit here so I’m going to try to get this in before I leave.

I’m trying to hype myself up for my idea of a hybrid photo album.  Hybrid scrapbooks and photo albums are not new.  It’s been around for awhile but I’ve only heard about it a couple of years ago.  It’s the process of combining scrapbook pages with photos.

For me, sometimes I take thousands of photos a month and sometimes barely any.  For the thousands of photos, they pretty much sit on my computer drive for years.  I’ve got tons of digital photos dating back to 2002 and because there are so many I get overwhelmed as to what to do with them.  After a year of thinking and planning and learning about hybrid scrapbooks I decided to try it out.  My idea is to create a main page for each section using the traditional scrapbook method or digital for a 12×12 page.  The pages after will be in sleeves of various options.

For instance, I’ll take the digital layout above and print it into a 12×12 and will go into a 12×12 plastic sleeve.  Then, in the next sleeve (and more than one sleeve if needed-due to lots of photos that I’d like to print), I will arrange printed 4×6 photos in a normal photo book fashion.  Like this:

This way, I am able to print all the 4×6 photos I want and keep the theme together.  When scrapbooking the traditional way, I always had so many photos leftover and didn’t quite know what to do with them.  Putting them in a separate photo album just didn’t feel right.  I wanted to be able to see the scrapbook design as well as all the other photos that are of the same theme.

I’ve got three hybrid photo albums so far and have only begun.  I will post my albums as soon as I have more in them, which I hope will be soon.

Digital layout credits: Irene Aleexeva Designs for the free digital page.  Nothing but freebies for the stamped white flowers.♥