Scrapbooking: The Good, The bad and The Ugly.

This is Stacy and I am so pleased that you are working your way through our pre-classroom. Before our class opens, I am anxious to share with you some of the personal experiences that led me to develop a library system in the first place. (deep breath) I, like many of you, jumped into scrapbooking full of enthusiasm. I was so excited that I had discovered a hobby that seemed to so perfectly marry my quest for creativity with an outcome that I found meaningful for my family. I had one and a half children at the time I started scrapbooking. This was, by the way, back in 1994. Before I knew it, I had three children, three little boys under the age of five that were very, very busy, and I was completely and utterly overwhelmed by them. Sort of overwhelmed by life. We were living in Salt Lake City at the time, and my husband was completing a medical residency, so, honestly, I was quite a bit like a single parent at that point. Life in general was overwhelming, let alone the rolls the film that I as shooting and the sheer number of pictures that I had begun expecting myself to use in scrapbooks. Lucky for me, and yet at the same time also overwhelming, was the fact that I very quickly got involved with the scrapbooking industry. I started teaching at my local scrapbook store and at the very first conventions. I also started writing and participating in activities with Creating Keepsakes Magazine. So, the more that I saw from other people and the more that I witnessed the industry grow, the more pressure I felt to keep up. I look back now and it was a good time, but I felt a lot of pressure. It's something that I now refer to as Scrapbooking: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I knew that I loved scrapbooking. I knew that it was a good hobby for me, it just made sense on so many levels. At the same time, there seemed to be more and more frustration and confusion and pressure that I put on myself. Pressure is not good-in fact, it's bad. I felt way too inferior, too often and I very often felt intimidated artistically. I would get my issue of the magazine in the mail, and instead of flipping through it and feeling energized and inspired, I would feel sort of depressed. That was not a good feeling, in fact, it was an ugly feeling, and I didn't like it.

About four years into my work in the industry, our family made the decision to move. We left Salt Lake City, Utah, and we moved to a small town in Idaho. It proved to be an important time for me, an important transition time, because I allowed myself to step back, take a deep breath, and kind of think about where I had been and where I was headed with scrapbooking, what my motivations were, and what my ultimate aspirations were. I actually sat down one morning and I made a list on a piece of paper with pencil. I made a list with two columns. I wrote down the things that I loved, the things that I wanted to keep, the things that I valued, the things that were exciting to me, and the things I was good at. I also wrote down a list of all the things that I didn't like, the things that made me feel inferior, the things that made me feel inadequate, and the things that I wanted to let go of.
I don't know if it was just the act of writing those things down, but I remember standing up and going "Wow!" Okay, I don't have to do things in a certain way, I don't. I especially don't have to expect myself to do things or to feel the pressure to do things that are creating negativity for me. So I decided to let go. I decided to just take some time off. I decided not to unpack my boxes of rubber stamps and scrapbooking supplies. Rather I would use my free time to sort of figure out what I wanted to have happen ultimately with this hobby. I began to think about different ways that I could approach memory keeping that might allow me to let go of the bad and simply embrace the good. It sounds a little bit nutty, but it's really true. I would actually encourage you to do the same thing, even in the next week, whether you actually write things down or not, or whether you just kind of go through a mental process. Perhaps you go on a walk or you take a drive, or just have a conversation with a friend and articulate the things that you love and enjoy and want to keep about scrapbooking. Also articulate the things that you don't like and that you would love to let go of. There are no rules in scrapbooking. REPEAT: There are no rules. You have a great and amazing potential to tell compelling personal stories, and it is definitely your prerogative to let go of things that create pressure and that make you feel overwhelmed and inadequate. I have been there. I have got your back 100%.
During this "Idaho" period, I had a conversation with my mother one day that proved to be pivotal. I had driven my boys home, and we were sitting in the backyard of my childhood home outside Seattle, Washington. It was a beautiful summer day, just the perfect temperature. The kids were playing and we were sitting at a picnic table as I remember it, and we just started talking, and exploring random memories from all periods of time from my childhood. We talked about camping at the ocean in the old orange truck, we talked about taking walks and collecting bags of aluminum cans that we turned in for recycling money that I could use to go school shopping. We talked about how we used to pick berries and make pies, and how pie making is a lost art. We talked about how my best friend Lori and I would put on Esther Williams style swimming shows in our backyard swimming pool which was not heated, enough said, Seattle, not heated. We laughed and we reminisced. I walked away from that conversation and I had a very specific thought, which was this: I want people when they look at my scrapbooks, to feel like I feel right now. I want them to feel like they've had a conversation with me. At no time in this conversation with my mother did I or she refer to any dates. Hmm? We didn't feel like we needed to talk about things in any order. We didn't say, "Okay, this is going to be so fun, we're going to reminisce now and let's start with 1979, and let's talk about all the major events and holidays and things that happened in 1979, and then we'll move on to 1980". There is just, for some reason, and trust me as I have contemplated this for hours on end, there is for some reason a general paradigm in scrapbooking that requires us, or would make us think that we are required to put things in order. We crave order, true - but it doesn't have to be date order, and that's what I want you to know. Chronological order is not the only order. In fact, after this conversation and as I reflected on it more, I realized that the books, many of the books that I have read, and I love autobiographies and biographies and memoirs, and many of those books that I have loved the most have been those that presented peoples' life stories in glimpses, in a way that was here a little, there a little, and where there was a lot of room for sort of making connections between "this and this" happened way back then, and that led to "this and this", and I met "so and so", and they introduced me to this person. Looking back on your life with that broad spectrum, that big picture perspective, I love those kinds of stories, and it just clicked for me that that was the kind of storytelling I wanted to do. That was the kind of legacy I want to leave.
About a month or so after that experience, I was on an early morning walk and was for some odd reason thinking about the definition of a noun. A noun is a subject word. It is a word that is a person, place or thing. I had a total "eureka" moment, and I said to myself, "Oh, my heavens", if you can take all of the subject words in the English language and you can divide them up into three easy categories, then certainly I, Stacy, can take my piles of completed scrapbook layouts and my list of potential scrapbooking topics and I can also divide them up into the same categories. They are either about the people that you love, or about the places you go or have visited or they are about the things that you do that make your life yours and unique. I sprinted all the way home, from the top of the hill, a half-mile back to my house. I started making lists and jotting down notes and sketching out ideas. and I had this big stack of layouts at the end of my table, and I remember going over and grabbing them and sitting on the floor and thinking "This is going to be so awesome. This is going to be so easy!". I am just going to divide these layouts up into these categories, and as I looked through the layouts I realized that as good of a job as I was doing telling my family's stories, I really wasn't taking the chance to emphasize those underlying themes of people, places and things! I wasn't scrapbooking about the people I love and how I've connected to places and the everyday things that I do and value. I was scrapbooking events. So it was a huge wake-up call for me, and it made me even more excited to try and adapt the idea of categorizing things and setting up my photos in a way that they would support the approach that I was after. So, the interesting thing was that as I developed these ideas and as I shared these ideas with people that were not scrapbookers, they would be like super excited and they would say, "Oh my gosh, that is so cool. What a great way to do it. I think that I could probably do it that way". Oddly enough, as I shared my ideas with friends who were already scrapbookers, they, for some reason, were much more reluctant, and would respond with questions like, "Are you sure you can do that?" "If you do that, then what do you do with the page that's about such and such". They would sort of challenge and test me, whereas the other people would just be like, well yeah, that makes all the sense in the world. So it is truly interesting, that once you get into scrapbooking, you have a tendancy to create barriers if you will, and you put these blinders on that limit the way that you're allowing yourself to think and create.

Anyway, it was a long process. It took me several months before I was able to outline and apply the basics of the library system. And then, honestly, it took a couple of years to really feel comfortable and confident with the processes that I'm going to share with you. Please keep this in mind. Even though our time together is a long time, I am giving to you and asking you to implement in only 3+ months what has taken me years. So, you must be patient with yourself. Remember that now with my hindsight is 20/20, I am absolutely confident that adapting this system and continuing to fine-tune it and maintain it is the very best decision that I have ever made in regards to my creativity - not just my scrapbooking, but my personal creativity. I love the way my photographs are organized. I love what this system allows me to do in terms of responding to inspiration, and in terms of making connections that become more and more evident and more and more significant over the years. I love the way my family can go into our music and memory room and retrieve layouts that are in our library albums.

I am so looking forward to our time together in this session. Together we are going to hang onto the good and let go of the bad - so you never have to have ugly, uninspired thoughts again. That's BIG.