Got Magazines?

If you are a crafter of any sorts, I'm pretty positive that you have idea books and magazines taking up valuable real estate in your craftroom.  I sure did.  I decided one fine day that I was only going to keep what I liked out of the books/magazines and get rid of them.  But I didn't want to have to store the pages that I tear out and I wanted to keep the books intact so who ever received them once I was done had the entire book/magazine to flip through.

Today, I wanted to share how I decided to keep the ideas that I liked out of all my books/magazines without tearing the pages out.  

I chose to scan all the ideas that I liked.  Yes, I know that the books that are pictured are now available in digital format.  But I had the hard copies.  Plus I usually don't like all the samples in every book.  I know that's not nice to say, but I'm being honest.  I really like this idea because it allows me to only keep the ideas that I am absolutely in love with.  

Most of the ideas that grab my "its a keeper" attention are ones that can be easily replicated in volumes.  For example, I don't like to just make one card.  I like to make multiples of the same card.  So with that in mind, I'm looking for ideas that have embellishments that can easily be duplicated. 

With this scanning process, I can also take out parts of the book/magazine that I don't need or aren't interested in.  This works really well for the kinds of magazines that have two samples on each page.  If I don't like both samples, I just highlight the one I do like and keep only that part of my scanned image.   

Now keep in mind that these are for my references only.  My own digital idea book if you will.  I keep my scans filed on my computer under each book/magazine publisher that I had scanned them from.  For example, the books shown above are all from Northridge Publishing.  So I have a file for that publisher.  Within that file I break it down to what kind of book; cards, scrapbooking, Cricut, etc.  The cards file was getting so filled up that I broke that down even further by theme.

I know this seems like a lot of work, but once it was done and all those books came out of my crafting space...WOW what a difference!  I no longer buy books or magazines for ideas.   I strictly use my folders and Pinterest.

Thank you for stopping by!