Creating Scrapbook Layouts With No Photos

I'm not talking about photoless pages but about creating pages than printing & adding your photos later.  I talk about it a lot.  I do it all the time.  In fact, I have a stack of about 7 layouts sitting on my desk that I plan to print photos for today.  For me, the worst part of the process is editing and printing my photos.  My husband is an amazing photographer and I love the photos that he takes of our family and adventures.  Me, not so much.  My photos are often dark, out of focus, to far away or just plain crap.  Our older photos tend to have many of the same issues that the photos that I take have.  But, and this is a big but, these photos definitely represent memories of our life that I want in our family albums.   So I end up editing 90 percent of the pictures that I put on my layouts. 

Friends, I do not like editing photos.  I don't want to take the time to really learn how to do tricks with my software and sometimes my program has a mind of its own and will not print the way it should.  Bottom line, the stuff that makes me happy is the creating.  The rest is grunt work.  This is one of the why's of why I would create scrapbook pages without photos.  Sometimes, I will remember an event and get a page idea for it and I feel the need to get to work on the page right away and I don't want to stop and print pictures.  Or I will have a story that I want to tell and I plan to take photos that represent it.  Crazy right?  Crazy fun and easy:)

So you may be wondering how it works.  It is not hard at all to create this way and it works for mainly 2 good reasons:

Reason #1 - I'll have to edit the vast majority of my photos anyway so why not do it to fit a layout that is already done.  Photo editing programs have made it fairly easy to resize photos so the different photo sizes are easy for me to get. 

Reason #2 - Photos often need to get cropped in this house so this is a step that can easily be customized to make them fit a page I've already finished. 

This is such a great method for me and I have been using it for years.  While I do have a few layouts that don't ever get photos, the vast majority of pages are done and in my albums.  These are going to get photos this week.....

I was able to create a couple of layouts this weekend that I did have photos for and I have about 4 pages done that I created with my kit.   It did get easier to get some pages done once I relaxed about using only the kit products.  Trying to make myself only use the kit was a major pain! 

This is one of my youngest a few years back when we had this epic snow storm.....

 

 

This one is the September page for my calendar.........

 

 

And this is a layout about when my youngest was little.  We could not keep him out of our bed!  He loved his room and would happily nap in his own bed.  When we tucked him in at night, it was always in his own bed and he didn't fuss about it at all but it never failed, he would wake up in the middle of the night, climb a flight of stairs to get to our room and crawl in bed with us.  It took years to break him out of this habit!

On the home front, my husband has finally gotten around to installing the backsplash in our kitchen.  I LOVE it!  Seriously, I am in love, love, love....

 

Thanks so much for stopping by!  I hope that you will give scrapping without photos printed a try.  If you do, I would love to hear your thoughts (love it, hate it, or indifferent:))

Happy Monday y'all!!