Organization and Mindset

My new place has a large linen closet, part of which I’m using to store most of my scrapbooking stuff. I’ve been dreading organizing it, because it is mess.

Today I realized it makes sense to organize the stuff for the project I’m working on – select it and keep what I’m working on out or in the cupboard in the kitchen closer to where I scrapbook. So I did just that.

My current project is a heritage album of my great aunt’s snapshots of the family’s summer home. I selected a limited number of materials to use for this project and put the rest away, thus making the closet even messier. That’s OK because my mind is clearer about what I’m doing with this project. I have some great paper I’ll be using to add variety to the pages, rather than having everything just black and white and sepia. Muted colors, some old-fashioned patterned paper, a few stickers.

There’s still a lot of work to do on the project. I feel like I’ve been organizing these photos since forever, and in fact it has been years. It’s very important to me to let them tell their story in a compelling way. The usual way of organizing them, by year, was taken away when someone dropped the box that the photos were in. My aunt had them filed by year with index tabs, but not labeled. After some quite a bit of examination, I realized the photos were no longer in order and not necessarily in the right sections. Perhaps this will ultimately be a good thing, as grouping them differently could be much more interesting. It is hard to date some of them however.

Bringing this project to National Scrapbook Day now seems like a good idea – I was previously against bringing it anywhere. Also, I’m much more excited about the project because I’m including different paper and embellishments. It’s amazing how some thought and organization can change a mindset and improve attitude.