Organizing Magazine Information

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.

Information I kept was 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 (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, and 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, 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.

By Monica Resinger