Organizing Magazine
Information
by Monica Resinger
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.
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