Why haven't I been scrapbooking?

I've been thinking a lot about why I haven't been scrapbooking much, or paper crafting in general either. A few years ago I was averaging several hundred pages a year. Then life got really, really busy - selling our condo, moving into my sister's basement while we built our new house, working on the new house, moving into the new house, unpacking, having a friend live in my craft room for a few months, babysitting my nephew last year. The list goes on, even leaving off just the normal day to day stuff of homeschooling our boys and running a household. Yet, I used to scrapbook all the time. I like it enough that we set aside a whole room in our new house for me, painting it the color I wanted, setting up the closet so it was more usable for storage and everything. So why am I usually lucky if I get in there once a week to work on anything? For crying out loud, I have stamps I bought a month ago that I haven't even done anything with, not even adding the picture to my stamp index. Let's be really realistic here. I don't know that I've done anything in my scrapbook room since I finished the layout a day challenge at the end of January. I did a few pages the beginning of February, but that was in the living room at the birthday crop I threw myself.

As I read over an organizing article on Two Peas in a bucket (this one), it gave me an idea of why I'm not scrapbooking. The first reason is really, truly simple. I haven't printed pictures since around June 2006, except the pictures of us building our house. The pictures I have left are the ones that I wasn't really inspired to scrapbook in the first place, ones that are left over from when I was scrapping the other groups I got printed at the same time and I picked the other groups first because I didn't know what to do with these ones. I've decided I'm going to pick a sketch for each group and just follow the sketch, using ribbon or buttons or some generic embellishment instead of trying to perfectly match the theme of the pictures with the embellishments. And I set aside $50 to get new pictures printed. It'll probably just barely put a dent in what I have to print, but it'll get me new pictures, up-to-date pictures, and hopefully that will help me be motivated to scrap also.

The second reason, the main reason, is that I haven't found a way to organize my stuff that makes sense to how I scrapbook now. That's the insight I got from reading the Two Peas article. I have 3 paper sticker binders that I have a bunch of stuff in. I used to love them, I used them all the time and they were so great. Now though, I don't even remember to look in them half the time. I was really drawn to the rooms in the article that had stuff organized in bins and boxes, jars and baskets. I don't know why that is so appealing to me, but I think, over the years, my style has changed and with it, my organizing needs have evolved too. I think I'm beginning to be more visually oriented than I used to be. I'm also moving more from stickers and diecuts to stamps and textiles. I think I need to do another purge of my scrapbook stuff, and find new ways to organize what I have left. I think doing that will draw me to my scrapbook room more often. And it'll make it so my desk is hopefully cleaner : ). My desk, right now, has so much stuff piled all over it that it's hard to get motivated to even start because I have to move stuff to even make room for two pieces of paper.

Anyway, just my thoughts for today. I'm going to go exercise and then play around in my scrapbook room, seeing if I can organize it a bit better, get things to the point I can play a little today.

Danielle