Where I don't lack motivation is scrapbooking. It's my creative outlet. I use it to decompress from the work week - and most recently (December) the workday.
See what happened was, I realized I watch too much TV. I work in front of the TV all day. It's usually on and is there to make noise. I don't like working in silence. It reminds me that I live alone and work alone and that I have way too many conversations with my cats. And so, because of the TV thing, I decided I wanted to turn it off when work was done and either read or scrapbook.
The first week when work was done, I went into the scrapbook room. I didn't want to work on any big projects and just wanted to "play around". That's when it dawned on me that I could scrap random photos. Basically, scrap photos that really don't mean anything, may or may not have a story, but it would allow me to scrap, work on my skill, use up my stash and be creative. It was so liberating to realize that I didn't have to "have a reason" to scrap something.
And so started the Random Scrapbooking Project.
But wait, I needed to be "organized" in this randomness. And yes, I do realize organization and random are antonyms. This is the part where when I explained it to my BFF she rolled her eyes at me and my process minded self. After putting some thought into it, I wanted to "process" it out so that I could stay focused in the randomness. I know. I know. When I say it out loud it sounds crazy, but I promise you it made a huge impact on how focused it's kept me.
I have about 200 sketches for scrapbook layouts. These are sketches (or other scrapbooker pages) that I've collected. Not every page is a brand new creation. Many times, I take inspiration from what other people have done. My page is never an exact duplicate of their page, but it gets me inspired. Those sketches are numbered in a folder on my computer.
Each week I select 5 random numbers - 1 through 200, and those are the layouts I make. Then I have to find photos to use. Being that these are random, it's really easy to do. Plus, I have a thousand cat photos to pick from.
From there I gather the supplies I want to use and I get busy. In most cases, in a week I'd do those 5 pages and then some. For December I did what's called December Daily - well my version of it. I came up with 31 "topics" and I did a page with a photo representing that topic for each day. It was a blast and I used up a TON of Christmas supplies. But December Daily really helped create this habit of going upstairs every day and scrap a page or two.
Enter January. My department at work reorganized and put me in a Director position of the Project Management Office. That means my team of PMs are scattered across the globe. Which translated into me starting work at 6am most days (and one day at 5:30am and one day once a month at 5am). That means I get off work by 2 or 2:30. THAT gives me several hours in the scrapbook room with daylight. (I don't like to scrap when I have to turn on a light. It changes the colors of papers and embellishments).
Here we are in February and every day I could I go up in the scrapbook room and do 2 or three pages. Here's just a small example of what I've done since Jan 1.
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| I realize as I look at this one now that I've not added any title or journaling. This was my grandparents 25th wedding anniversary. |
You can see how random they all are and how most don't really belong in any "project" scrapbook.
My goal this year for scrapping is 365 pages. It's not even the end of February and I'm at 79 pages already. I might have to adjust my goal to make it harder.
What I've noticed after scrapping each night is I feel very accomplished and satisfied with myself for not sitting in front of the boob tube. Now, if I can get just a little of that motivation to rub off in the "getting to the gym" goal.
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