Organizing
Magazine Information
Learn how to turn all those old magazines into useful scrapbooking
material.
by Monica Resinger
March 23, 2004
I've always enjoyed home and garden magazines. So much so that they
quickly began to pile up. Soon I realized I couldn't keep each and
every magazine because my house just doesn’t have that kind of space.
Keeping every magazine wasn't doing me any good anyway. I couldn't
find specific information when I wanted it.
So what I decided to do was to keep only the articles, pictures,
recipes or other information that I was interested in. Each time I
read through a magazine, I'd clip anything that I thought I might
like to look at later.
Some items I kept were pictures of decorated rooms, craft instructions,
garden designs, information about specific plants and more. Sometimes
I would make a note right on the clipping what I liked about the information
so later when I looked at it I would know why I clipped it. For example,
on a picture of a decorated room, I'd make a note that it was the
color combination I liked about it. If it was an article, I'd highlight
the information that interested me and so on.
So what do I do with my clippings? First of all I set them in a wicker
sewing basket until I get time to work on them later. Then when I
am in the mood, I get the sewing basket, scotch tape, scissors, pen,
highlighter and my cheap notebooks. I'm sure you all know what I'm
talking about by cheap notebooks. The spiral bound 70 page notebooks
that you can find on sale from .19 cents to .99 cents depending on
how good the sale is. I started out with about 10 of them.
Once I have all my items together on a nice big work surface like
the kitchen table, I begin. First thing I do is sort the clipped information
into related piles. All the bedroom decorating information in one
pile, the craft patterns in another and so on. You can sort yours
any way you like. You may want to break down a category such as crafts
if you have a lot of clippings.
After sorting, you can see what categories you'll need. At this point,
you can label each one of your notebooks with one of the categories.
Next comes the fun part -- putting your scrapbooks together. Trim
any rough edges and tape the clipping to one of the pages in your
notebook. Simple as that but fun to see the items grouping together
knowing you'll have the information at your fingertips.
Now I'm sure you could use different materials for this such as scrapbooking
materials or your own binded papers, but this is a cheap and easy
way. My mom makes her own binded construction paper books and her
categories are different than mine. She loves pictures of horses and
angels so has books for those. The possibilities for this are endless
and only limited to your imagination.
It is so handy to have these books when it comes time to start a
project. If you've been collecting information for quite a while then
start a project on that category, that information becomes very valuable.
They are also fun to take a look at every now and then.
© 2000 Monica Resinger
Monica Resinger publishes an e-mail newsletter for homemakers
that poses fun questions to readers about organizing, crafting,
gardening, frugal living and other homemaking subjects; readers
can respond to the questions and receive the resulting, very informative
'tip sheet'. If you'd like to join the fun, send a blank e-mail
to: HomemakersJournal-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
