Progress!

In the past two days I've completed (80) 8x8 page layouts, printed, trimmed and in the books. I am quite pleased with myself. I decided to complete albums for both the girls from beginning of 2009 to current. However, I think I'm going to end up doing different albums for various categories (vacations, holidays, summer, birthdays, etc). I personally think it's so much fun to see how everyone changes from year to year. The nice thing about that is it will be easy to take pages out of one album and put them into another should I decide to. I can also print out duplicate layouts if I do more than one album.

Anyway, with the categories in mind, I decided to start with the smallest category...Halloween. Mostly because Shabby Princess has the cutest halloween album put together called "Smell my Feet" (the photo above)! So, I finished Halloween layouts from 2003 through 2008 and put them in its own album. Emma got such a kick out of looking through that and seeing her and her friends over the years (all of whom still live on our street).

My sister-in-law looked at some of them and commented about how much ink I must be using printing them all at home. I have outsourced printing before from Scrapbooks to Share and they do a wonderful job. Definitely check them out if you don't want to mess with printing and trimming your own pages. They charge $1 per page for 8 1/2 x 11 or smaller. I would definitely use them if I decided to do any 12x12 pages since I wouldn't be able to print those on my own printer. As far as cost effectiveness - so far I've spent about $80 on ink and photo paper. The ink is still going pretty strong too. So, I'll save a little bit doing it at home, but I'm definitely not losing money. I'll be looking for less expensive photo paper (I'm buying it at Staples right now) - which will save me some $$ too.

Hope this will encourage some of you to give digital a try!