Scrapbooking school photos, production-line style.

So guys, if there's one thing I find boring to scrapbook, it's school photos.  The limitation of school uniform colours (which for our family have included maroon-and-gold and currently includes forest green) and the sameness of the format, year after year, times three children.  No wonder I'm so far behind!

But on the flipside, when you get into the zone, catching up on a whole bunch of school photo pages at once is a great way to churn through a bunch of pages - in less than a week I've managed to make 18 pages towards my 100-page spending freeze goal!

If you've never thought of doing a production line of pages, here's my process:

Step one: choose the photos you want to scrap, keeping to one theme. 
In my case, the theme is obviously school portraits, but you could apply the same process to many other themes, eg beach holidays, birthday parties, christmas etc.

Step two: Choose papers
I pulled out school uniform colours and whites/neutrals.  For layering I pulled my large scraps in these colours as well as yellow and red for contrast. 
(Optionally, you can focus on particular products you want to use up - I focussed on two paper pads I still had quite a few papers from)

Step three: Adhere papers and photos.
(But don't put your papers away just yet!)

Step four: titles
If you own a die-cutting machine or letter stamps, now is the time to use them!  With repetitive titles like "Year 5" "Year 6" "Year 7", now is not the time to be wasting all those "a's" and "e's"!
I picked out a largish offcut of cardstock that matched a page, chose some other pages that could use the same colour title, and went to work on my Silhouette.  I simplified the process further by using the same font and text size.

Step five: embellishing. 
Again, rather than go through every embellishment in your stash, pick a small selection that works with your theme.  I chose a set of largish wood veneers and my fake enamel dots.  I also used washi tape, the branding strips from the papers I had used and also cut a few circles from my left-over papers to give my embellishments somewhere to sit.

Step five: Journaling and finishing touches
I don't journal a lot (or sometimes at all) on school portrait pages, so this step is easy.  Finishing off meant splattering and trimming off the bits that hung off the edges.  But of course you have full permission to go back and pull more bits from your stash.  I was doing a couple of soccer portrait pages at the same time, and I went back and made fake flair for those pages.   

Have you ever tried production-line scrapbooking?  Whatever your preference, I hope you find some crafty time this weekend!