I've always been a believer that people should have personal hobbies that bring them fulfillment. Jeff and I have managed a good mix in our lives of family time, couple time, friends time and individual time. So I would always take advantage of my individual time (and a good chunk of my friends time) to devote to my hobby.
Over the course of my life the hobby of the moment has covered just about every aisle in your typical craft store. Needlework, tole painting, quilting, flower arranging, miniatures, there was even that basket weaving class. But by far the hobby with the most staying power was papercrafting (scrapbooking and cardmaking).
It is a wonderful hobby. I think it has stuck around so long because I've always loved to look through old pictures and the idea of saving my families stories means something special to me. But then I got caught up in the "stuff" of the hobby and found myself not loving it so much anymore.
So I took a look at why:
- My little pockets of individual time were not being spent creating anything anymore. Where was the time going?
- I found myself in a huge mess everytime I started a project. I told myself this mess was part of my "process". Maybe true but it made me not want to start at all because I knew how much time it would take to clean up the aftermath.
- So I spent lots of time trying to devise the perfect organizational system for my supplies so I could clean up easier (everything has it's place and all of that).
- This equated to spending lots of money on specialized organizational supplies.
- I found the world of craft blogs and added every one I liked to my Google reader. Thinking all that inspiration would help me use what I had easier and without having to pull out lots of supplies I wouldn't even end up using.
- The motivation for why I enjoyed this hobby in the first place hadn't changed so I didn't want to abandon it all together.
- One answer to the "mess" problem could be to complete more projects digitally. I had dabbled a little bit and been fairly happy with the results.
- I needed to stop trying to tweak the organizational system and realize that I just had too much stuff. If I created a scrabook page every day for the rest of my life I would still have enough supplies left that Isabel could probably continue on and do the same.
- There was a certain amount of shame in how much money I had spent on all of these supplies. I justified it because I received so much product as part of my design team responsibilites with Quickutz. The leftovers were being sold on ebay and I felt less guilty at the time spending that money on more supplies. But wouldn't it have been better to save that money for family vacations or anything more joyful than more stuff that was just causing me stress?
- Part of that desire to acquire came from my blog reader and the ease of ordering online. Seeing things used in beautiful and creative ways can be inspiring but it was also costing me money.
- A significant chunk of my time was being spent reading blogs and surfing creative websites. Saving all the ideas to be done "someday".
What have I done about it:
- Purging the physical. My supplies have gone from enough to fill our smallest bedroom to fitting inside an armoire. And to be honest there is probably more that could go. I will set a timeframe (probably one to two years) to do this again.
- Purging the electronic. I have moved all of my favorite craft blogs out of my reader and into my bookmarks. They are there if I need them but I won't spend the time going through every post and being tempted by the contents (for the record I removed 63 blogs during this process).
- Go digital. My plan is to try and use this blog to record those memorable stories (all those things lost because I was spending my time dealing with the stuff of scrapbooking instead of what really mattered about it) and to transfer them to simple digital layouts.
- I will continue to create cards for now to satisfy the creative desire to use actual paper and supplies. My hope is that all the purging will keep the process neater.
