I was recently organizing some new supplies. Keeping in mind the idea that deleting some old things might be good, I decided to check out my Alphas – I use them so rarely. Well one thing led to another and then I was here:

And then I made another pass at it-

Which brought my alpha collection down to 2888 items… which left me feeling 50 pounds lighter and smiling from ear to ear.

I’m curious, do you delete?

I love weeks that things slow down and we have the time to just be – to think – to plan and organize.  This happened for me the past ten days and there were quite a few things that came from all that downtime… one of which I thought you all would find helpful and especially relevant to your scrapbooking.

I have so many people ask me, “WHY would you take “all that time” to organize your supplies?  It sounds crazy to spend hours tagging and organizing… I can’t see how it would be worth it…”

For those who read this blog in that same school of thought, I am going to share with you the WHY.  The reality is my WHY probably won’t be that popular with designers, store owners, and others – but it is a win for you and I.

The fact is you SAVE MONEY when you organize your supplies.  Quite frankly, with the economic times we live in, I think that is a very GOOD thing.

If you, like me, have several favorite designers who email you kit previews of their latest and greatest so you get an email from a designer you love just about every day… and then you can’t resist clicking on the link to buy that kit quickly to get it at the early bird discounted price because you don’t want to miss it….  Well, this benefit is for you…

The other day I got this in my email…

If you haven’t seen kits by Cinzia Designs, you can find them here – really amazing designs that are gorgeous and some of my favorites…ok yes I am enabling… but there is a point…  I surprised myself by not buying this kit!  Why?  Because these days I open Lightroom to check out what I already have by the designer before purchasing anything…and I saw that I already had these…

Not exactly the same, but the colors are very similar and the designs are different but close….  So I passed on buying it!  It was hard, and my “OCD collect it all” side of my personality has me a little stressed that I missed it, but seriously, if I want to scrapbook, the kit I already have with similar designs and colors will be just fine!

With the holidays upon us, there are some amazing and gorgeous holiday kits coming out – like this Yuletide Memories Collection at Two Peas:

Simply beautiful kit.  Before organizing my supplies I would have hit the “add to cart” button faster than you could say, “Ala Peanut Butter Sandwiches!”  However, after organizing, I simply click on the keyword for “Christmas” and find all my existing beautiful Christmas kits and items…

And then the beautiful kit is a LOT less tempting…

Add to that a Smart Collection that automatically brings in all the supplies in my library that are keyworded Red, Green or Christmas -

and I get not only my Christmas kits, but also everything red and green in my digital collection that could possibly be used for Christmas cards, layouts, etc…

So yes, organizing your $upplies does $ave you money.  Just in the past two weeks I have come across FOUR kits (at around $5 each that is $20) that I didn’t buy because I found things in my collection that are similar enough I don’t really need them.

And true confession: I only have about 10% of my current supplies catalogued and organized by all these variables right now.  Imagine what happens when I get ALL of them done?

All I can say is my husband is loving my purchase of Lightroom  and all the time spent on organizing what I already have!

I can’t say enough good things about Lightroom – I really believe this is the last organizing software I will ever buy (excepting upgrades of course).  Why?  Because in the past two weeks I literally dumped everything out of my digital supply catalog, made major changes to the files in another software and then re-imported them – and guess what?  All that work to keyword kits, designers, colors, etc. wasn’t lost – it stayed with my files!!!

So all of you who have spent hours and hours organizing your stuff only to lose the tags, keywords, categories etc. with the next upgrade or change of software – your solution is Lightroom.

And now for the calmer part of this post – I think I have used way too many exclamation marks – which must be a result of 1) too much hazelnut hot chocolate, 2) 4 inches of beautiful snow blanketing my yard, or 3) more than my fill of pumpkin pie this past weekend…maybe all of the above.

Seriously – what’s not exciting about saving money, finding software that works for you – not against you, all the while making your digital scrapbooking life so much easier?

Yes, you would be dotting this post with exclamation marks too!

Ok – back to tagging and organizing…