I have quite a few friends who are phenomenal scrapbookers. My sister-in-law makes beautiful cards. Put a paintbrush in my mom's hands (and give her about a week) and she will do a Thomas Hart Benton to your walls. My Aunt Kate can turn scraps of fabric into Mary Magdalene. I can sit at the computer, puzzling for hours over the perfect word, but sit me down with 500 pictures and a stack of paper, and I just want to be done.
As scrapbookers go, I'm definitely on the scrapbooker-as-historian end of the spectrum. I buy cute paper and some of the fancy tools, but I get so easily overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the work I have to do (right now I have sixty-two pages in various stages of completion on my kitchen table) that I just get frustrated and want to give up. I worked on about 20 pages last night (didn't finish them, just worked on them) and went to bed thoroughly exhausted. Today, I can't seem to muster up the energy to start back in. I really like the journaling part, but trying to decide whether to use the black pen or the purple one and whether to put a single border or a double border around a picture just tires me out.
But the thought of the 42 barely-started pages sitting on the table tires me out more. I hope that by the end of the weekend I'll emerge from the house, finished pages bound in their books, paper cuts dotting my fingers, and be able to turn my back on scrapbooking for at least another six months.
--originally published 1/26/06
No comments:
Post a Comment