Inventory Building

One of the best ways of building a paper supply quickly is to buy paper packs.  These packs range in paper counts between 24 and 80; the larger the number, the more papers there are to choose from.  You can also figure the higher number packs will probably contain paper; the lower the number, the likelihood of card stock contents.

What's best about any pack, whether paper or card stock, is that papers within that pack will always coordinate.   Probably the most important consideration while building an inventory

Most packs of any count run about $20.  I never pay for anything full price.  Hobby Lobby, JoAnn's, Michaels, regularly put these on sale for $10.   Regularly means between twice a month, but certainly once each month. (I can't vouch for scrapbook specialty shops because we only have one (boo) in our area and they are so pricey I can't afford to shop there very often; and when going, only hit the 50% off table, but drool at the rest!)  Most often when the paper packs are on sale, the racked individual papers are included in the sale.  However, there's no guarantee you can get more than one project out of each page later down the road.  I do often buy these papers for accent pieces needed from time to time.  Since the already packaged packs are still on the shelves, I can go down the aisle with the pack at home and pick out coordinating sheet papers.

For the first year of scrapbooking I tried to take advantage of as many of the sales as possible.  Buying one pad at a time feels as if it takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to build an inventory.  I'm more fortunate than most since my husband is very supportive of my hobby, and allows a generous budget with most of the "extra" money that comes into the house.  In a one year period I managed to purchase 27 paper packs in as many moods and themes as possible; some of the packs in places never believed to carry scrapbooking supplies, and usually for pennies on the dollar.

For those with a Cricut, or similar machine (now that there's different brands out in the market), an important consideration when buying paper is how well it stands up to the rigours of automated machine die cutting, and to a lesser extent when using an embossing machine.  An inferior paper will never stand up to detailed cutting with the Cricut.  Going about it the wrong way, I ruined pounds of paper trying to put it to purposes it clearly isn't designed.  That's never the case with superior grade paper and card stock.  It takes some practice to figure out what works and what doesn't.  I can assure you the rack paper at Hobby Lobby will not stand up to the test!!!  I wish I had kept a list of which brands work the best with the Cricut, but not yet.  Off the top of my head I can vouch for K&Company, Graphics 45, and We R Memory Keepers, and Creative Memories among others not so close to immediate thinking.

The last word about paper probably should go without saying.  I keep ALL my scraps organized by colour.  I don't know how many times when looking for a particular colour I've discovered papers from different packs coordinate with another.  I "try" to indicate on the cover of the packs when this happens, but that's another organizational weakness.

This year March is National Scrapbooking month.  I'm hoping some of the specialty on-line shops (that normally only have bi-annual sales) come out with special discounts during the next few weeks.  As the motto goes:  more bang for the buck!