4 years and growing ...

1. Finish Europe Scrapbook

It took me the better part of 4 years but I put the finishing touches on my Europe scrapbook over the weekend. I started scrapbooking the spring of 2004 after Kristy & Chantal came back from Mexico, almost a year after I took my trip with Beth & Mel. We still lived in the Party House and a group of us (Kristy, Chantal, Karen & Sabrina) would get together every couple of weeks to work on our individual projects together. Sabrina is our "dealer", she works for a scrapbooking company so she is our direct line to papers, stickers and all the cool tools that make scrapbooking an absolute addiction. As our lives got busier we found less and less time to make scrapbooking a group activity, but still get together periodically to share ideas, trade tools and tips and provide positive feedback about eachothers work.

We spent this last weekend at a bed & breakfast near Ferintosh - scrapbooking, socializing and getting pampered by our hosts. They provide 3 square meals a day, a huge room to spread out our projects, a hot tub, lots of beds and as many cinnamon buns as your heart desires (not to mention tarts, pudding, pancakes and an amazing dessert that tasted exactly like a drumstick). I enjoy scrapbooking - it combines my love of taking pictures with my penchant for hanging on to assorted oddments that I pick up along my travels AND I get to hang out with 4 girls I don't spend nearly enough time with now that I am in Calgary (and who am I kidding, in the last year before I left for Calgary). I also find scrapbooking challenging which is why I prefer to do it in a group setting so that I can get opinions and positive reinforcement that my efforts don't look like crap.

I'm not quite sure how to explain why I find scrapbooking so challenging. It's not exactly that I don't think I am a creative person - but it's not a part of my brain I use very often so my creative skills are a little rusty. And I have always been told that I am no artist - which is true in the sense that I couldn't draw a stick person to save my life - but I am starting to realize that you can be artistic in ways that don't involve drawing or painting and I like that scrapbooking is an outlet that allows me to find my inner artist and to express myself in ways I might not otherwise be able to. I have ideas for other projects now that the Europe book is complete, a little smaller than scale but by no means less important to telling a story about who I am and where I have come from. I'm looking for other ways to tell that story - blogging here more often is going to be another outlet, buying a new camera and taking more photos is a top priority. It's all about opening myself up to new ways of expressing myself, new ways of thinking about communication, new ways of figuring out exactly who I was and who I am becoming.