Why I do this scrapbooking thing...

I just remembered WHY I used to scrapbook so much. It's not for the fun stuff...it's for the memories. Like so many other people I started trying to design too much. I got too caught up in the embellishments and the toys and the techniques and forgot about the most important part...the memories.

One of my projects for 2012 is organizing my house - mainly getting what used to be my scraproom in the basement cleaned up and converted into some other type of room. I hate the basement, it is cold and smells like cat pooh (it's where the litter boxes are), so I've moved some of the scrapping stuff that I actually use up to my bedroom (not cold or stinky!). Since I haven't been using the basement room for it's purpose, my husband as slowly piled things in there (computer parts, painting supplies, legos, etc). Now that room is a mess. I can hardly even walk into it to get other supplies that I left down there.

Unfortunately, one of the things that got left in the basement were all of my scrapbooks except the one that I was working on at the time - my little girl's baby album. Which means the basement has been a mess for at least 2 years! As part of cleaning up & organizing, I decided the scrapbooks needed a new home. Somewhere that people COULD look at them, but not somewhere where the almost 3 yr old would tear them up. Tonight I cleared off the bottom shelf of my bookshelf on the landing at the top of the stairs and moved almost all the scrapbooks from the basement to that shelf. Easy access - but not somewhere she normally plays.

Back to my original thought - the memories, not the scrapbook industry fluff - as I loaded the books onto their new shelf, I wanted to put them in chronological order. Flipping them open to figure out the dates lead me to flipping through the entire album. The one of my senior year of college. The year that I moved into an apartment, got married, gained a step-daughter, bought a house - all in ONE year. The trip we took to Atlantis in the Bahamas. The scrapbook that I made for my step-daughter of things she did while she lived with us. And all the memories in between - until 2007 because in 2008 I got overwhelmed with the scrapbook industry fluff. In 2009 my baby girl was born and the only album that I worked on was her baby album although honestly, I only made it to her 9 month page - that was the year that I attempted to scrapbook in the stinky basement.

In 2010, I started Project Life. In 2011, I did it again. This year I will again.

And I'm going to go back to 2007, 2008 and 2009. I have two PL albums Cobalt for 2012, Clementine for the past. I didn't get the core kit to go along with Clementine because I have so much stuff left over from the Original Kit & Turquoise and now I have the Cobalt Core Kit.

I'm not saying that there is a problem with all of the scrapbook fluff. I still LOVE some of the fluff - but for me it was overwhelming.