Where's My Motivation?

Excuse me, have you seen my motivation? I seemed to have lost it.

I’ve got nothing witty to write about and no social commentary to disparage and definitely no news on the sewing front and not much going on in my cooking world either. Alas, my unmotivation is really setting in as of late. Of course, I’m also putting in more hours than usual at work, multiple projects I’m way overdue on finishing for church, and there is also the prospect of maybe having to move here shortly that might be putting a damper on my creativity level. Might? Methinks those are definite factors.

Yesterday I got together with a couple church friends to scrapbook the next four pages to send to our sister church in Uganda, but I apparently wasn’t alone in being unmotivated. We all seemed to either have our minds elsewhere during the project or were completely uninspired to work on it. Perhaps there is a bug going around and the symptoms are not wanting to do or make anything. Okay, so maybe this is a little dramatic, but it isn’t outside the realm of possibility here. I mean, us creative folk do tend to get a bit excited and moved to create when something new strolls into town, but we also tend to all slump when the newness wears off. Same thing holds true in someone being passionately creative rubbing that passion off on everyone else, as well as when they are completely downtrodden about the project and that lack of enthusiasm spreads throughout the group.

So here is my plan; I have tomorrow off, so I will try to refocus some of that lack of creativity into reenergizing myself. Instead of watching two or three movies on Netflix or spending the entire day on Pinterest pinning things I will probably never make or do, I’m going to work on projects that need worked on. I will clean the house just enough to make it so we don’t look like slobs. I will make a large pot of coffee, which will make me have to pee every five minutes which in turn will make me much less productive and reenergized than I’d hope which in turn will lead me to the couch and Netflix. Crap! I’m already setting myself up for failure!!!

Disaster Areas

Sometimes when projects are plentiful the house can get into a bit of disarray. Sorry folks, there’s just no way around that.

Currently our kitchen table is flooded with cardstock, rubber stamps, ink pads and felt tip markers surrounded mostly done Christmas cards. If there was a way to take up less space I’d have figured it out by now. With so many different supplies needed at your fingertips, it is near impossible to reduce the required square footage. Trust me, I’ve tried. Even when I had the craft room at the old house with a specific scrapbooking/card making station, it still looked like a tornado had come through and tossed everything onto the desk.

Now that we share the office space and craft room, it is less likely to simply see a closed door concealing the contents inside. Of course, I have half the room set up just for sewing currently. My cutting table, otherwise known as a foldable card table with a cutting mat on it, currently has fabric stashes for at least four different projects I’m working on. Seriously I have yardage, bits and pieces of batiks for The Desperate Housewife’s Quilt, various sized pieces and scraps from the Auction Quilt I just finished, the backing and border fabrics, along with the remainder for the Green and Brown Baby Quilt I’m working on, and piles of fabric strips ready to be cut and pieced for final blocks on The Fall Quilt. They are just all over the place on that small table making it a wonder I can use it to cut anything at all!

The obvious thing to do would be to organize it all, but then I’d end up taking everything out again and the process would start all over. So instead I will simply put the fabrics away that I’ve already used and are finished with and fold them into columns onto the bookcase I have in the room to hold it all. That way, should I need to come back to any of those projects, the pile used will still all be together. As for the stamps and cardstock, I just need to finish the damn Christmas cards already!

Addendum: I just walked into the craft room/office because I was trying to upload this onto my blog and lo and behold I remembered I had fabric for a fifth project piled up on top that I scrapped because it was, well, far too uninspiring to even start. Oy.

Rubber Stamps

Yesterday after work I started packing up my rubber stamps and scrapbooking supplies. Please note I only started this process.

Holy crap! I realize that when I was a Stampin’ Up! representative that I bought a lot of rubber stamps, but until I took them all out of their extremely organized and efficiently stored cabinet to pack them for the move I had no idea just how much I actually had. Not only a lot, but about half have never been used or even put together. I smell either a project or a prospect on the horizon. Either I can put them all together and use them or leave them as is and sell them. As much as the money sounds appealing right now, I’m leaning towards the former.

More than likely they will all stay in this particular cabinet after we move. I mean, there really would be no reason to not keep them in there even though we’ll be using the desk as a computer desk, the monitor and keyboard will only take up space on one side. However, even if that doesn’t end up the case, I can always find space somewhere to store them until needed.

Funnily, I got into scrapbooking because friends and family were really getting into it and when their interest in the craft waned, well, so did mine. This isn’t to say that I don’t want to still create scrapbooks or memory albums, because I have a multitude of magazine boxes filled with memorabilia from various events waiting to be placed in a more permanent home, just that right now at this time in my life I’m just not in the mood to create something that harkens back to better times. Then again, that might just be the distraction I need after we move.

I Miss Scrapbooking

The other night while we had friends over we got on the subject of Disneyland and Disneyworld, which in turn brought up scrapbooking. Or should I say, the vast amount of stuff I have yet to scrapbook.

Let’s see, with an entire area devoted to scrapbooking in my craft room, one would think I’d be able to simply sit at the desk (yes, even a desk and stool!) and work on a few pages here and there. However, my craft room is in a nearly constant state of chaos, and the desk is usually covered in random unrelated crap. I could blame my scrapbooker’s block on having not printed pictures in nearly four years, but I have so many pictures already printed, many in their own box with the paper, album and other scrapbookables, that this excuse is bullhonky.

So perhaps today after I finish the ladybug mobile I’m working on for my Etsy shop, wash the dishes, go grocery shopping, make a pirate ship out of Rice Krispie Treats and cover it in fondant and make fondant pirates for a cake order this weekend I can work on a page or two, probably from our wedding. I know that once I start that will be all that I need to gain momentum and finish one of them at least.

Of course, my partner came up with an excellent way to scrapbook our random collage of crap (greeting cards, plays and programs, funeral programs, newspaper clippings and pictures) which is to separate everything by year and make a scrapbook for each year. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this. I will still make the special scrapbooks, like big vacations and life events, but by making yearbooks so to speak, it will not only give a purpose to some of the random stuff I like to keep (even the not so pleasant stuff) but also reflect our lives together. Isn’t that the purpose of a scrapbook anyway?

Scrapbooking

Way back in the days when I was in my twenties, I used to scrapbook… a lot. I also used to print every picture we took, in doubles, put one set in a photo album, and the other set I would go through for scrapbookable pictures with a story to tell, and place them in a photo box, which is really just an old gift box with nifty Christmas wrapping paper on it, or go directly into a scrapbook if I was eager to work on that specific event. I haven’t had pictures printed since January of 2007.
 

To say I was obsessed would be an understatement. I actually became a Stampin’ Up! Demonstrator only for the discount to feed into my addiction, and at the time, that meant you had to have $300 in sales per quarter. Do the math. That’s $1200 a year… for stamps and paper.

When I redid the craft room, I specifically devoted an entire workstation, installed a cabinet, and got a filing cabinet for scrapbooking supplies, as well as storage boxes for stuff to scrapbook, making sure everything coordinated with the bedspread I had just made for the futon, as this room doubles as a guest room. The saddest part is I don’t think I’ve actually scrapbooked since spending all that time and money creating a unique area devoted to this art. I’ve made a few cards, yes, but scrapbooks? I’ve got at least a dozen of them on a shelf in my bookcase just waiting for rubber stamped images, decorations and pictures to complete them.

I’m hoping that once I build up the courage to tackle cleaning up my craft room again, I will be in the mood to, I don’t know, at least start working on our wedding album, as two of the four storage boxes are filled with stuff specifically for it. One box is designated “Scrapbook” and is the hodge-podge of random stuff, like greeting cards, plays and productions, and other various little things I’d like to scrapbook. And then we have our “California 2006” box, which surprisingly is quite full for the four days we were there, as well as a bag of other goodies from our “Disneyworld 2007” trip. Ah memories, that in my aging days are fading away. I just hope I don’t wait too long, look at a picture and ask myself, “What the heck is this in here for?”