Happy Monday, fellow scrappers! Melissa Kaiserman here, excited to serve as your hostess this week.
If I sound surprisingly chipper for a Monday, it's because it's truly my favorite day of the week. I see it as a chance for a new
start and a fresh perspective.
Sometimes I think that’s really all we need in our hobby
when faced with a lack of creativity or when we haven’t made a page in so long
that our tools seem only vaguely familiar.
It’s easy to think, If only I had
a room devoted to scrapping or If
only all my children were old enough to wipe their own noses and bottoms, then I would actually fill all those empty page protectors.
Those very thoughts have frequently crossed my mind. I have four children who range from 8 years
to 11 months. I also homeschool my two
oldest, so I don’t have chunks of time during the day when fewer little people need
me. Plus I live in a very small house and
do not have a scrapbooking room. Or even
a nice-sized closet. I don’t tell you this to gain
your sympathy, but to let you know I
understand.
I’ve been chronically discouraged by how infrequently I sit
down to make a layout, but I was slow in moving toward a solution. I recently decided to stop believing that my
circumstances have to be ideal in order for me to scrapbook or work on some
other fun project. I purposed to make
changes that would allow for creativity even with limited space and time. Those changes are still in process, but I
wanted to share some of them with the hope that they will inspire you to make
your own small adjustments and recapture the joy of making stuff.
I’m going to spend some time this week describing the steps I took a
couple of months ago, starting with
Moving my supplies to
an easily-accessible area.
When we first moved into our little starter home six years
ago, we had two boys who shared a room, and I claimed the third bedroom as my scrap
space. Then our daughter was born and it
became a scrap room/nursery. Then it
became a nursery (now with two cribs in it following the birth of our son) with a room-dividing curtain hiding
my teeny little scrapbooking area. Like
most of you, the most logical time for me to scrapbook is when the kids are in
bed. But since two of them slept in the
same room as my supplies, it wasn’t happening. I knew I needed to be resourceful and come up
with a plan.
In our living/dining area we have a standard oak hutch.
There are teacups and teapots behind the glass doors, and
in the bottom section I stored pie plates, my cake pedestal, and other serving
pieces that were used infrequently. I
realized that if I could empty the bottom cupboards along with the two drawers,
this would be the perfect spot for my supplies.
It’s centrally located, I can get into it any time of day, and it’s
relatively safe from little hands.
There was no way all of my supplies would fit, so the trick
was to decide what I absolutely needed in there. Can I just tell you how freeing it was to be
limited in that way? I only chose those
supplies that I love and use often. As
for the rest, I purged some of them, and others I put into storage where I can
get to them easily if necessary. If I
don’t use them in the next few months?
Off to the LSS yard sale they go.
So I went from a scrap room that looked like this four years
ago
to a scrap half-hutch.
Tomorrow I’ll share specifics on how I organized my supplies
so that they would be both easy to work with in this small space and pleasing to the eye. I'm all about the cuteness factor.
In the meantime, if you are in a situation where you find
yourself rarely scrapbooking because you don’t have a designated “space,” start thinking of some
creative ways to carve one out using what you have. Or if you’ve already gone through a similar process,
please share a comment on this post. You
never know how your creative ideas might help solve someone else’s dilemma!
