All About Me – the book!

Because having a blog isn’t narcissistic enough.

I am a digital scrapbooker. I’ve been doing it for 4 years now and have over those years been active on a number of boards and done a great many challenges.  Mostly I scrap my kids but sometimes the challenges are to scrap something about you.  Recently we had a discussion on one of the forms about Scrapbook Fantasies Book of Me blog. She gives you prompts all year & you end up with I think around 35-40 prompts and 60 pages. 

I’ve been thinking about doing some sort of album of me for a month or so now. Maybe a collection of scrapbook pages about me or maybe an All About Me Project 365 next year.

Me me me me me me ME!!!!

Sorry, just had to get that out. Now back to…um..me.

I am self-centered enough to want an entire book about me but I am realistic enough to know that if I went with a photo project probably by mid February I will have run out off interesting ideas and be taking pictures of my toothbrush and sock drawer. Which I could assemble in a photo book with little post ironic snarky zeitgeist comments, or not because I am not entirely certain what I just said actually means. I can certainly see the humor in myself & am not above self mockery but I don’t think I can manage 365 photos of it.

I spent a few days going through old challenge notes and visiting forums and blogs and have assembled about 75 prompts for a Book About Me. Not that I will use all of them but it’s nice to have a list to work from.

Then I went though all my layouts (643 to be exact) and found about 60 that were about me. There is a lot of overlap on topics. For instance I have 4 layouts about my home and 5 about my childhood and 3 about crochet and an embarrassing number about my electronics. About half of the layouts are bad from a design standpoint. The scale of the elements is off, the shadows are either huge or non-existent, bad recolorization, bad photo adjustment, hideous color choices etc. But I saved the layered .psd (or .psp) files so I can fix them or at least have a base to rework them.  I’ll weed through them & remove the duplications (I have 3 that feature my mp3 player) and then sort out what prompts I still want to do and that will be my project for next year.

I’m also going to do another 365 Photo project in 2010 but I need a topic.  I did the boys play in 2008 and that came together nicely. This year has been topic free, more random & I find it harder to do. It’s not looking as cohesive. I think I work better with guidelines. I’m looking for ideas now.  Any theme suggestions?

I’m leaning toward monthly photos of the same things, with some other general topic mixed in. I’m thinking of every month having an individual photo of everyone, a photo of some outdoor feature to be determined (like the maple), a photo of some indoor feature (like the sink full of dishes or a pile of laundry) and a photo of my book stack. That is 7 out of approx 30 photos a month.  What other things can you think of that change yet stay the same over a period of time? I’d like about 10 things that regularly appear and the other 20 or so will be on a general topic.