Telling My Story: The Introduction

This morning after a busy holiday weekend I waved my kiddo off to school, walked back to my kitchen and where I usually would brew myself a cup of coffee.... I encountered a sink full of dishes and counter tops that I could barely see. This is in part because my husband "helped" with the cooking this weekend.

The electric griddle was sitting on top of a mega-pack of paper towel rolls on the kitchen floor. His giant monster juice machine was crowding out the toaster. I really just wanted to sit down with my coffee rather than scale what felt like my very own dirty dish k2. Yet I knew that those sticky stacks were high enough for me to see from the kitchen table. If I didn't tackle that thing, before breakfast, I would only end up with indigestion.

I put on my purple dish gloves, grabbed a sponge & got to work feeling very much like a drudge. But then I remembered that I have a number of wonderful & entertaining podcasts that auto-update on my phone. I grabbed my DROID and decided that an episode of Paperclipping Roundtable was precisely what was called for. I love a good podcast! I was focused on the conversation, my mind had something to play with, something to turn upon, but all the while my hands were busy chipping away at a breakfast bowl tower of Pisa, and a dinner dish tower of Babel.

At a certain point I looked around & found the mountain had been brought low. I had finished the dishes & I had podcast time to spare. On to breakfast! I was listening to Paperclipping Roundtable 013 Taking It Beyond the Page. They were talking about art journaling, about blogs, and quilting and collage and all sorts of mixed media things that can tie in with scrapbooking and also about how each lady in the panel found her way into scrapbooking. It struck me that the unifying thread in each woman's experience had been the desire to tell a story. I think I tell stories on my blog, but that is an area where my scrapbook pages are lacking. This is due in part to scrapping photos several years after the fact and is one of the reasons I have recently begun taking so many online scrapbook classes. I am a storyteller & I want that to be reflected in my scrapbooks.

The conversation moved on to where many of these different art forms began, how old they are and at what point they began to blend their edges with scrapbooking. One panelist talked about how plain scrapbooking was in the beginning and how she realized what she was doing was not an expression of her. It made me think of my own scrapbook beginnings and all the Scrapbooking booths I approached at craft fairs, full of a desire to fill up albums with darling photos of my newborn. How as the consultant talked with someone else, I would page through her albums, how turned off I was by them, and how I would try to slink away without talking to anyone. I had no desire to do THAT to my precious photos.

So this is going to be a self-indulgent series. I want talk about how I started scrapbooking, how it was in my blood, somehow, long before was a Mom or realized what I was doing and where it has led. This figures quite well I think, with my One Little Word for 2010: Purpose. By looking at how I have come to this place, I can be more intentional about where I am going. I can set my course and (as the cook in me desires to call it) plan my meals.

(It amazes the HECK out of me that even at this point the words scrapbooking and journaling are not in spell checkers - please get with it dictionary builders! - And by-the-way why do Spell-checks not check Subject lines & Titles - they are PRETTY important too! - Exclamation points galore, run-on-sentences and strong feelings, today.)