“I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.”
― Neil Gaiman
― Neil Gaiman
While the above quote is hilarious, i have begun to feel just so.
As I have embarked upon my scrap booking adventure, I have acquired countless sheets of paper, a TON of stickers, compiled loads of tiny relics from my trips, printed out almost 100 pictures, and I have been throwing it all into ONE box. This old Bath & Body Works box that I got from my old retail job's semi-annual sale a few years ago when the sale had ended... Ah, re-purposing.
And side-note: that sucker was heavy. SO heavy that I was barely capable of lifting it, so I consistently enlisted my dad and Samuel to carry it back and forth from my car. :)
So this week, I took the time to organize myself.
I've never been able to work in chaos- I eventually feel like I'm going to suffocate, and that's how I started to feel when I started to do another spread for this week. I have learned that creativity, while wild and untamed, has to have some order for me.
So there was this little guy!
I bought him (his name is Alan- in honor of Mr.Alan Turing) a couple months ago to organize and tote all of my school papers and folders. It was a crafting bag that was on sale at Michael's after the holidays. Well... He did more sitting than rolling around, and he was being housed in my classroom, collecting papers that had obviously been forgotten about...
So it was time to do some cleaning, organizing, and re-purposing my re-purposed bag for its original purpose- scrap booking materials.
After going through two months worth of papers and putting them into folders (just in time for conferences, hooray!) Alan was ready for my scrapbooking things! Here is how everything was being held originally. We will call them "before" and "after" pictures:
trip relics- before
This Bath & Body works gift bag was storing ALL of my trip pieces. And I'd have to dump the WHOLE thing out to find one little piece.
Trip relics- after
With the help of a magnetic close box that I got on sale at Hobby Lobby for $6 and a few binder clips that I brought home from school, I can finally see all of my trip pieces! It will make sorting through what I have so much easier, as well as finding all of the little pieces that I want for each spread!
stickers/paper- after last week's debacle
Last week, I had a little bit of a problem. There are no pictures of this problem because I was ... not in the mood afterwards. I had bought the perfect pack of stickers to use, and when I put them in my big box of chaos (let's call her Pandora), they got smashed, and they really weren't salvageable. So I turned around and went out and bought this box for scrap booking paper, and I have been using it for a week now. I LOVE having everything safe from crinkling, tearing, and smashing.
so all of my materials were taken care of!
The hardest part was going through all my stuff that was already in the bag! It took me over an hour to sort through all of my papers. But here was the end result- ready to be filed on our workday this Monday!
And then there were all of my mimi's hole punches to consider...
Yeah, this wasn't working for me either. They're heavy, and hard to package. Therefore, I pulled out a few of my favorites, and put the rest away in my room. It was finally time to compile all of my scrap booking happiness into Alan. Mr.Turing was ready to organize some creativity! Here is the final product:
good-bye anxiety! hello scrap booking magic!
I honestly think that this is one of the biggest lessons that I've learned about my creative skill, and creativity in general. Some people work best in creative environments that are chaotic- I have learned that I do not. I need order in order to let my brain think outside of the box. My box was the box that my brain was having a hard time forgetting about, so it was hard to leave the frustrations associated with it and focus on my pages!