I am a scrapbooker.
There, I said it. It's kind of embarrassing sometimes when people say
'you ... what?' But I am. A scrapbooker. It's something I have to do. I care. A little bit too much.
About taking all of the pictures. I care about beautiful papers and
prints and patterns and color schemes. I save things. I write down the stories,
even if I'm not the best writer. I really like that kind of stuff and I
don't care if some people think it's dorky. I'm back, I'm doing it. Here we go.
My parents took a lot of photos when I
was growing up and looking at them now absolutely has an effect on me.
They bring back memories and they make me feel. We all want to
see things the way they were, remember times long gone and see the people
we love in their younger years. We want to know the stories and where we
came from. I'm pretty sure it's human nature.
In recent years, I took a hiatus from
scrapbooking. On my break, I explored other crafts and hobbies. There's nothing wrong with that. But while I was gone, I missed scrapbooking.
I used to be into it
pretty deep. If you've read this blog since, well ... the beginning, you'll know that I was very much into scrapbooking in years past. I would scour
Two Peas for days. I became pretty involved at SIStv. And
Red Velvet Kit Club. And all kinds of challenge blogs, collaborations and art journaling projects. (Remember
Work Your Soul?) I finally I found my tribe with my girls at
The Dares. If I'm losing you, I am so sorry. I'm getting deep down into the denizens of paper crafting people here.
But eventually I felt burned out by the 'old way' of scrapbooking, fun as it was. I
would spend entirely way too much time on one page that would hold one or two photos. Convincing myself that I could realistically keep up with documenting
life in that painstakingly slow way started to feel overwhelming. So I stopped
completely. I didn't know how to carry on so I didn't. I still love most
of those old pages I made – don't get me wrong. But with all the work I was doing, I wasn't keeping
up with life. What made me feel worse was the fact that during my scrapbooking hiatus, a few more years had come and gone and I didn't feel like it was
possible to go back where I had left off and start again.
I realized
that my children didn't have baby books. And that
bothered me. Their best and most eventful years existed in the photos on my hard drive. I had
scrapbooked random moments about Lotus when she was a baby but the story
I wanted to tell was not there. My favorite photos were not there. I
wanted to share it all and I needed a better way to do it. I thought
about this for a long time. I saw a lot of my online friends doing
Project Life. I thought about it some more.
Then,
last fall I hung out with my good friends Jamaica and Kristi. And we talked about
scrapbooking. Like only true scrapbooking nerds can. I shared my
frustrations about wanting to document my kids' lives. In a doable,
realistic way. I needed a photo book and it had to tell the stories, use my favorite photos and
still look cool. And my pal
Jamaica
looked at me and said, 'You should really just try
Project Life, Jen.' She told me all about
it. And so I went home, went through my hoard of scrap, printed some
photos and and jumped back in.
So there you have it. Here I am. I'm a scrapbooker. And I'm on the
Project Life Creative Team. I am stoked to be actually working on those baby books right now. And I look forward to sharing my progress/strategy here and on the
Project Life blog very soon.
Maybe you've taken a break from scrapbooking too ... maybe we can do this together. xo.
