Pages In Progress

There's actually a scrapbooking store across town that goes by the same name. Pretty clever, eh?

I've decided to mini-blog about what I'm going through while making this scrapbook. I'm just trying to do the layouts and journaling and get through the meat of the matter now and then add the papers, colors, and embellishments once I get my hands on my beloved external hard drive back.

There are three habits that I'm struggling to learn and practice with scrapbooking.

~ Streamlining the entire process. I've already talked about it. This is probably the issue we all seem to have with life in general, lol. One thing I'm trying hard to do with this album is to use layout sketches I hunted the internet for yesterday.
~ Embellishments. I know where one could go, but I have no idea what to use and I'm just realizing this now. I'm pretty sucky at it and it shows in my work.
~ Journaling for the future. We all know that I love to talk/ tell stories. I could go on in great length and depth. The detail that I tend to record things (especially because I know I won't remember it on my own, but would want to) has become increasingly appreciated but what/ how I write is what I'm really working on with this book.

For instance, I'm on page 4 of the book and that's only about two hours after leaving the house to go on the trip. (Yes, I get that detail-oriented at times.) It features a single picture, which is a very rare incident for me, about how we could see the smoke from one of the local wildfires. I was just going to write about the current statistics, but then I thought about what kinds of things I wanted to remember years from now. These fires are scary enough, but what's making them even more worrisome is all of the deadly/ extreme that we've had around the World lately. I'll probably remember the events but to bring it around to what we were personally experiencing at the time seems to make it that much more relevant and poignant (I had to look this word up to make sure it was the one I meant to use, :P) down the road.

I'm suffering growing pains with my recipe scrapbook because I am just that bad with cooking. As much effort as I put into writing painstakingly detailed instructions, they aren't quite right. There's the tried but not the true part of the equation. I know I can correct and make notes to the recipes. Heck, I know I can then go in, add the changes, and get new versions printed! I just want to do my best to get it right the first time around. Then, there's the matter of getting nice pictures. Again, see above for the issues I'm having. Sigh, I am doing a lot of griping when I have so much to be grateful for. If these are my biggest issues today then I am truly blessed. They aren't, but that's not the point.

My mild neurosis and insecurities really get to me sometimes. *Deep breath in and slow breath out.* It's a good thing that blogging is carthartic. I think I'm ready to bunker down and get a few more pages done today. I'll see you soon. <3