Creative Ways to Keep and Release

After I wrote yesterday's post I realized that in '09 I started several "keep and release" projects that have and should help reduce clutter and the accumulation of things. Here are a few of my projects and how I've progressed.

1. Photos - This was my big project this fall. I used it as a Christmas gift to my sibling, in-laws and older children too. Photos degrade no matter how carefully you care for them and certain photos; color and instant, fade in just a decade or two if they are of lesser quality. I scanned my

photos into the computer, labeled and corrected over 1000 photos from my family and my husband's family from the 1890's until 1997. In the process I realized that I would have had only a few years before losing some of the instant photos as unrestorable - they were horribly grainy and losing color. All of the photos I scanned in I touched up with a photo editing program and I labeled them (sometimes just a best guess) as to year and who is in the photo as well as any events I knew of. One of my grandmothers had written on the back of almost all of the pictures she had so it was not a hard as it could have been. This would be a great project to do with an elderly relative if they are available to reminisce. I made a copy of the file for over 10 people and have the satisfaction of knowing that our family photos are now preserved for future generations. I'm not going to throw out all my original photos, but they can all go into storage in closets, labeled as to decades and I will not have piles of photos waiting for me to deal with them - well at least after I do the ones from 1997 to the present...

2. Old recipe books. I use to collect recipe books - especially the ones from churches, junior leagues and community fund raisers. These books took up a large portion of a bookshelf and some I only look at to get one recipe out of occasionally. I'm going through the books and taking out the recipes I want keep. Right now I am just placing them in plastic sleeves in a three ring binder, but I'd like to transcribe them (including the source, date and all my cryptic notes of substitutions). My full shelf has been reduced to a three ring binder. I also do this with recipes from magazines and newspapers too. I use a binder with a clear front pocket and use different decorative papers to denote which recipes a book holds (one for family recipes and one for recipes from cookbooks and magazines). I bought dividers for the notebooks and have divided the recipes in the usual way. I would not do this to a cookbook that had a lot of recipes I use or one that I thought was valuable for it's historical or even sentimental significance (a signed copy of Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking?).

p.s. The photo is one of me at age 5 making a pie.