Photo Bonanza

     I went to visit my Great-Aunt Ree the other day for her birthday (happy 83rd!), and left with a present of my own: family photos.  She'd given me some before, mainly of her mother (my great-grandmother) and her siblings.  After this last visit, I now have another 60, plus four large albums that she let me borrow.

     The first thing I decided to do was to go ahead, take the leap, and get a FlipPal scanner.  With these four albums, plus others from my mom's childhood that I still need to get scanned, I have more than enough work to get done.  I ordered the scanner on Wednesday and my USPS tracking says I'll get it tomorrow.  Fingers crossed!

     After scanning all of the loose photos on my all-in-one, I decided that I wanted to organize these photos in a way that presented them better than inside an envelope inside a storage box.  I also wanted to present the photos in a way that was somewhat more contemporary to their creation.  There's not a single 4x6 photo in the bunch, so a modern album wouldn't work anyway.  So I made this:

   I created this album using chipboard, archival safe card stock (paper), decorative scrapbooking tape, metal page corners, a decorative sticker, and a Bind-it-All machine. We already had the Bin-it-All and the corners, so the rest of it cost about $30 to make, which isn't any more than I might have paid for a large scrapbook album.

    I filled the album with 25 pages of black card stock and am adhearing the photos using black photo corners.  I'm then lableing the photos using a white Uni-ball Signo pen.  I've loosely organized the photos chronologically by generation, with my Great-Great Grandparents first, followed by their children, then their children, etc.  I'm still debating on whether or not to add some newspaper clippings and letters that I have as well.