Stacks of photos cramping your scrapping style? Are you buried under 4 years of HS memories, Christmas Holidays, or Summer Vacations? How about organizing them into a theme album? Great idea, but where to start? Try using the well-known “Building Blocks” to get your album started!

Despite the intimidating task, start by organizing the photos you want to use. For example, I decided to work with my college photos. My years at college consisted of four years, therefore I knew, immediately that my album would be broken into four sections. However, in order to know exactly what the content of each section would be, I found it necessary to gather all my photos from that era and organize them according to years. It became quickly obvious, that I had more photos of certain events than others, and those became the content headings of my sections.

So, now that your photos are organized according to event, it is simple to find the overall theme and start on the main building blocks:

Okay, you have organized your photos and thought out your building blocks, but still don't know where to start creatively? Consider your photos again - is there a general color-theme, or texture that comes to mind when you look at them? For example, my college colors were maroon and gold (or red and yellow, to make scrapping-life easy!) so it felt right to chose those colors for my block-pages. Or maybe you are scrapping photos of your wedding, what was the color-theme? Would those colors work for your pages? Incorporate these colors into your Title Page, TOC, Section Pages, and Dedication Page, if you like.

Once you've done this, you are more than half-way done! Consider a simple, or extravagant design, whatever you fancy, to present the TOC and section pages, do you want clean, graphic lines? Or a touch of whimsy?

Try coordinating your TOC page with your section pages to make the connection easier to see, and the strain on your creative-juices less. You may even decide all the pages within the section should correspond to this color or design-theme, or if you, like me, have been randomly scrapping a layout here and there that belong to this album, consider allowing the layouts within, freedom to take on whatever form or shape you choose!

I want to finish my college memories before my baby is born in October. I had already started a number of layouts for this album, but there was no order to the chaos, so I started to think of the building-block system for my album: