I received many new questions this past week, but none struck me as much as this:
Where do you start if you haven’t been scrapbooking your child’s life, and he is now 16? Do you start at the beginning or from now and work backwards?
We can all identify with this feeling. Every single one of us. The key to releasing this mental burden is knowing that being caught up is impossible. Just give it up right now, for your own sanity! There will always be more to scrap.
To quell this anxiety, you must set boundaries for what is good enough for you. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Memory keeping doesn’t mean just scrapbooking. Honor your memories by keeping your photos organized and protected from time.
- Reflect on the years gone by with multi-photo pages and extensive journaling. Create a mini-album if you need it, to celebrate all that time before you started scrapping.
- Combine scanned older photos with new digital images on a layout to mark how things have changed over the years.
- Completely let go of chronological scrapping. Keep your photos organized by date, but let your scrapbooks celebrate snippets in time.
- Remember that scrapbooking is a creative hobby, meant to offer you personal satisfaction not stress and worry.
I personally understand that internal pull to feel caught up and I struggle with it all the time. Let go of perfection to find greater peace and simplicity in your scrapbooking. This new perspective will unlock a treasure box of creative potential.
This is a good reminder and one that I need to hear OFTEN. I do scrap chronologically, it’s something I just can’t let go of. I stick to events, outings, etc. I just don’t get as much pleasure from scrapping only one pic from an event or doing ‘little moments’ – but I’m sure that will change when I have kids to scrap about.
But even though I scrap chronologically, that doesn’t mean I have to be stressed about how behind I am!!! I will never be caught up, that’s right. And I just have to be ok with that 🙂
I don’t scrap chronologically, sorta. I just scrap. I tend to work from both ends – when I get bored with the current stuff, I go dig up some old stuff from when the kids were little, and when I get sick of that, I do REALLY old stuff from when I was a kid. I do try to do themes – like our vacation, or the class trip to DC. So even though I never finish, I can finish SOMETHING.
this is some really good advice.
tfs.
scrapbook-crazy.com
Thanks so much for answering my question. At times (as with all things), you feel so overwhelmed that you do nothing (LOL)!
Great advice.