How I Pack for a Retreat : Step 1 - Planning pages

Many years ago, I was fortunate enough to attend retreats on a quarterly basis.  At that time I did not have a dedicated scrapbook room so all of my stuff was stored in travel/rolling totes.  Because of this, when I did attend a retreat I took EVERYTHING.  More often than not I used 25% of my supplies, if even that.

In 2010 I quit my 8-5 job and began traveling with Scrap-Mart full time.  On average I was gone 21 weekends a year for 5 years!!  That's a LOT of travel.  I loved it, however, due to the fact that I was gone half of the weekends a year for work I stopped going to retreats.  I could not justify being gone from my family for another  weekend, especially when it was just for fun.

In 2012 we completed our garage renovation.  It became my home office/scrapbook room.  Over the course of the next few years I perfected my storage solutions and tweaked things as my stash continued to grow.  Because I worked from home when I wasn't on the road, I still didn't scrapbook near as much as I thought I would.

Fast forward to now, I have returned to a "regular" 8-5 office job and am no longer on the road.  In 2015 I attended my first retreat in years.  I spent weeks preparing and planning and packing.  I have since attended two other retreats and feel I have perfected my packing for maximum scrapbook efficiency.

The first and most important thing I did was plan my pages.  I began by browsing and pinning sketches and layouts I liked.  I also took a screen shot of each sketch I intended to use.  I have the Collect app on my phone so I would upload the sketch into Collect and add the pics I wanted to use for that particular sketch.  I would also add any journaling or thoughts as well as what products I wanted to use, if I knew that at the time.  Here's a peek at what my Collect calendar looked like at first glance...



I had 23 layouts planned before I ever packed a single thing!  And, I did all of this in my "spare" time when I would have been playing on my phone anyway.  This is something you can do on a regular basis so you always have a plan of something you can work on!  Trust me, if you're like me and you are strapped for time but get the urge to scrap the last thing you wanna do is go sit at your desk and browse sketches and photos and try to decide what to do.  If you keep a calendar of ideas going you can get right to work when you have the opportunity to sneak off for a few!

Join me again on Wednesday when I share how I pack and prepare to complete these pages!