Refueling My Creativity

I'm so worn out and running on caffeine right now. I actually feel guilty about the amount of sodas I've had this past week. On the bright side, it's income from doing something beneficial to the community and the future. After work was done, I turned into volunteer-mode and have hopefully finally finished creating all of the PCS cards that we'll need to launch this important campaign in the classroom.

My plan is to create more booklets this weekend and, come Monday, laminate and bind them at school. I hope to get a picture of each of the students who will be receiving these systems and of each of the remaining teachers. Then to print, trim, laminate, and Velcro those as the finish step. Yay, ambition! Lol.

I also continue to lend a hand in the fundraiser prep tonight. Mostly made sure that our area of the raffle baskets, gift certificates, and auctions were set to go. I hadn't even signed up to volunteer for the event, but I did stuff anyways. FMIL signed-up for the first cooking shift and that didn't pan out for them but instead served salads. This is on top of the fact that she also stuck it out with me yesterday to heavily help set up the raffle area. She didn't sign up for that either. Got to love giving spirits. We'll give 'til we drop and then keep giving from the ground/ whatever hole we're in. :P

I was too tired to stay, so I headed home with the intent to take a solid nap. However, that didn't work out because I used what little momentum I had left in me to start doing a bit more research into the fun topic I mentioned a few days ago.

In preparation for tackling another big personal project for this month, I found myself becoming increasingly intimidated by the sheer size of the project. I'm talking about my goal of scrapbooking each month and my family's summer album. To try to curb that growing panic, I looked into different kinds of scrapbooks one can make. It's worked! I've spent the past few hours absorbed into reading about various ideas, tips, and suggestions on scrapbooking. Now, I'm super excited!

Most of it stems from this one site: LOAD (Layout a Day!). Here are my favorite ideas from all of the reading that I've done so far:

• Don't go crazy setting standards and expectations that are too high for yourself. Don't limit yourself to a certain style, size, medium, or rules that try to dictate what's "right" or "wrong". Just let go and start doing something. It'll grow organically and you can always draw bits of inspiration here and there.
• Can't narrow down your photos to a few favorites or the cream of the crop? Then don't make yourself miserable trying to crate a scrapbook that looks like your local phone book. Try a printed photo book or a digital picture frame. My folks love their frame and are continuously rearranging and adding new pictures.
• Early on, try making a small mini album about a specific recent event or theme. This could be a once a month photo during the school year for your kids, she talked about fall favorites, or a recent holiday. 
• In terms of a family vacation album, she talked about family favorites. Each person choose three of their favorite moments/ memories, you find and set up the pictures, and they provide the words for journaling. You can also do a photo album scrapbook which inserts the average 4x6 into a large photo album but has just enough room for you to add little embellishments, notes, and pieces of memorabilia.

Awesome stuff to think about. You can probably tell by my past moaning and groaning why these tips meant so much to me. Another project-product I have recently learned about and am fascinated by is Project Life. It's a photo album scrapbook package-system that gets the job done in a simple, beautiful, and fun way. I don't even know how to really explain it without including all of the information they did, so just trust me and check out their website.

Once I get the scrapbooks that have already been planned done, I would love to try some of these new fresh ideas to practice more scrapbooking.