In the latter part of 2011 I finally got myself back into scrapbooking on a somewhat normal schedule. I feel confident heading into 2012 that most Friday nights, and an occasional all day, will be spent scrapbooking.
I can't say that the world of scrapbooking is as intriguing and all-consuming as it once was in my life, but I still enjoy it enough as a hobby. I love the creative spark it gives me, I love telling stories, I love looking over the photos, and I love putting something together that will hopefully last long after I'm gone. Over the past couple of years I have even gotten more simple in my scrapbooking to the point that I am looking around at my foam stamps and glitter and thinking, "is it time to purge these things?" I don't have the heart to at this point but I see that coming around the bend.
Bottom line is that I am about as far from what I walked into when I came to this town almost eight years ago but I am closer to the feelings I first felt when I began scrapbooking. I no longer want it to consume my every waking moment but I enjoy the outlet, the creativity, the fun, the laughs, the girlfriend time.
I don't bother with the magazines nor the websites anymore either. In fact, I don't remember the last scrapbooking magazine I even picked up. I was never really that into the websites, even in the heyday, but for some reason this morning I thought I would look around and see what was going on. I didn't really find much other than more of the same.
Which made me wonder: how is the world of scrapbooking these days?
Surely people aren't into all those design teams like they were a decade ago, right? I mean, give it a rest already. And those so-called "super stars" are surely not feeding their ego still, are they? (My Gawd.)
When I clicked on a few websites I was immediately reminded why I have happily stepped out of all that...crap. The projects, the egos, the layouts, the insults. Why is it that every unhappy or jaded scrapbooker out there calls other women lazy, fat cows? And don't get me started on the stay-at-home-mom haters. It is really quite sad for such a happy, positive hobby.
Maybe that is the problem. Maybe when you take something like scrapbooking and turn people who can match colors and add buttons to a layout and then we crown them and give them a float in their honor because, by golly, they are now super stars we have lessened the purpose of scrapbooking: creating stories and memories for your family.
I don't want to get all Mormon-Perfect-Family-And-We-Couldn't-Be-More-Happy-And-Blessed here but I do like the idea of documenting our everyday lives so my kids and grandkids will one day see what life was like for me/us in the times we live in.
As I perused the websites I spotted an interesting discussion about these women who spend hours and days on layouts that they need to submit either for a design team or for the magazines and ultimately miss out on the family time they are documenting. Irony? There is something wrong with THAT picture. I admit there was a time that I was so concerned with capturing a ton of photos of an event that I missed out on the actual event because I was too busy behind the lens of my camera.
I was there. I was in the middle of all that hoopla. I went to trade shows and expos. I subscribed to the magazines. I followed the movers and shakers. I wanted the newest and greatest. I wanted to eat and drink the scrapbooking world. And, I did for a few too many years.
So consumed, I was, that I was missing out on what was happening right under my nose and certain situations that I will never, ever have back and for that I will gladly shed my scrapbooking obsession and go back to the bare roots of this hobby back when I did it because the sheer act made me happy...not because I wanted my layout to be published or because I HAD to use the newest product or because some woman somewhere was whoring out projects that I too had to do...but because I enjoyed being creative and I loved looking through pages and pages of albums and reading jouraling that I would never have remembered otherwise.
My friends laugh at me when I said that I wanted to try and find a Creative Memories Fast Formula book. You see, when I was using those fast formulas-a-la-Creative Memories, circa 1999, I scrapbooked happily and simply and without a care in the world.
I did my pages using stickers and lots and lots of journaling and spent many a happy afternoon while my two little boys took naps, and uncovered such a fun hobby!
So, part of me felt that if I had those books again of fast formulas that I could somehow grab hold of that FEELING again.
Okay, I was wrong.
The books are lame today, thirteen years later.
It was like deciding to have big hair again. Or, long floral dresses of polyester.
It is outdated and you just can't go back.
But, during the discovery of these fast formula books I realized that my heart really likes scrapbooking and maybe even simple scrapbooking and that I definitely don't want to go back to idolizing women because they managed to hop on a bandwagon just as it was passing through their town. I'm sure they have tons of followers...go for it...but I am not one of them.
I deleted all their websites from my list of favorites.
I no longer care about their word of the year and projects they pimp every other week. I no longer care about layouts that get published or attending scrapbooking expos. And I most certainly don't care about this design team or that design team.
I just wanna scrapbook. I just want to push paper around and laugh at the photos of my kids with silly faces...and cry at the photos of my dad holding the kids or giving Jennifer a kiss...and feel a sense of sadness when I look over our difficult year on the east coast. Not perfect little documented lives of idyllic times and perfect children living in a perfect house on a perfect street where no one cries and if they do they wipe them fast because, after all, we are blessed. No. I want to FEEL the emotions and write down what I can remember and laugh my ass off with my girlfriends and stick Dymo words like "freak" and "you suck" and "tubas" on our scrapbooking tools while laughing so hard that we are almost peeing our pants.
I just want to have fun with the hobby...and not make it everything.
Because it isn't everything.
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