It was a good idea at the time.

Saturday my sister in law and brother in law are hosting their annual niece and nephew birthday bash. Every year, Carol and Steve put a lot of effort and expense into a wonderful family gathering.

When I was at the Creating Keepsakes Convention in Buffalo in June I took a class with Stacy Julian and did a 6X6 album using 30-40 photos and only black embellishments. I chose last year's photos to do.

Now here is what was a good idea at the time. I thought it might be nice to colour photo copy the book and give every family a copy. Well it turned out to be a much bigger project than I had anticipated. The number of books we needed continued to grow each time we went through the list. We were able to copy 2 6X6 pages onto a legal size paper. I didn't think that was too bad but then realized that the book contains 20 pages so that would be 10 photocopies for each of 10 books. Beginning to get the picture. Then it is impossible to get reasonably priced 6X6 or even 8X8" albums so we had to make our own.

I found some nice notebook covers at Dollarama that could be cut down to fit. Purchased a box of 100 8.5 X 11" sheet protectors and sat down to trim the photocopies, the sheet protectors and the covers to accommodate the 6X6" pages. This is still a work in progress and I only have tomorrow to do it. Talk about making my life more stressful than it needs to be. Oh well, I know the books will be appreciated. However I am not setting a precedent that I have to do them every year. Next year I'll have to come up with something less time consuming or start a whole lot earlier in the year.