Episode 62: Scrapbooking Yourself 1/10 The Important Stuff That Really Matters

Welcome to the Scrap Happier podcast, where we share quick tips, tricks, and techniques to help you create scrapbooks you love and be happier while doing it. I’m your host, Alice Boll.

I’m so glad that you joined me today. We are kicking off a brand new series. Now we’ve never done a series here on the scrap happier podcast before. So I’m really excited about this one. We are going to do 10 episodes that relate to putting yourself into your scrapbooks. One of the most common things I see from scrapbookers is that they never scrapbook themselves.

They scrapbook everybody else in their life. They’re so busy telling their children’s stories that they forget how important it is to tell their own. Now, maybe this isn’t you. Maybe you’re already good at sharing your own stories. And for that, I applaud you. I’m so happy that you’re able to tell your stories.

My goal is that this series will help you have a more rounded and fulfilled approach to scrapbooking about yourself, whether you’re already good at it, or you’re not. Or you have never made a single layout about yourself. And because we are complex people leading complex lives, there are many different types of stories that we’re going to want to tell.

There are different kinds of pages that we’re going to want to create to really give a well rounded approach to scrapbooking ourselves. And I’ll be the first to admit, some of these areas are areas that I’m weak in as well. So while I’m helping you find some good stories to tell, I’ll be finding some of them for myself as well.

So let’s strap in and get started scrapbooking some of these important stories about ourselves. And there’s nothing like starting with one of the most important ones first. Let’s talk about the important stuff, the things that really matter to us. I want you to imagine for a moment that somebody from the outside, somebody who didn’t know you, was observing your life.

Maybe not as creepily as a peeping Tom, but somebody was observing your life and checking to see what does this person do, what do they believe in, what is important to them, what are they going to see, what if they look at your life for 24 hours or 48 hours or one week, what are they going to see you doing, are you spending time doing the things that are the most important to you, And I’ll be the first person to admit that we don’t get to spend 24 hours a day doing only things that are important to us, that allow us to spend time on the things that are the most important to us, but we should be including some of those things into our day, into our week, right?

And I guess if you asked me, cleaning my house and shopping for groceries and doing those mundane tasks like paying the bills, they don’t really rank high on my priority list. Like obviously they’re important so we do them, but they’re not the things that I consider the important stuff in life. Like spending time with my family, with my friends, making a commitment to my health and fitness.

Working on my personal growth, having a positive impact on society, making use of my talents. Those things rank a lot higher than paying bills on my list. However, I can’t do any of those things. I can’t care for my family. I can’t participate in activities with my friends unless I have those kind of things taken care of.

If so, well, I don’t think of them as priorities, obviously. Paying bills is not optional. I don’t think of them as the priorities in my life. They’re the steps that I need to take in order to really spend time with the things and doing the things that are the most important to me. If you sit down in a quiet place and think about the things that are the most important to you, what goes on your list?

What is the most important to you? This is a very personal thing. It comes down to what your values are, what gives you meaning, and what gives you purpose. When you take the time to know what’s important to you, then it’s easier to look at your life and say, but I’m doing what I want to do. I’m living my purpose.

I am living according to my values. What I’m doing has meaning to me. And it also gives us a chance to look at things and say, this doesn’t really fit because it’s not helping me achieve my goals. Now, obviously, this is not a self help, a self guidance kind of podcast. That’s not what we’re here for. We’re here about documenting our stories.

We’re here to make scrapbook pages that we love. But I think one of the things that makes scrapbooking so powerful is that as we document our stories, we are sharing these pieces of ourself. I’m going to read you the journaling from a page that I made in the fall of 2018 when both of my boys went off to college and university at the same time and suddenly my house was empty.

The page is called Missing You. When the boys started college and university this fall, at first I felt cavalier about it. I convinced myself that I was fine because I was so excited that they were starting such big adventures in their lives. I knew I’d be busy and I didn’t think I’d miss them too much.

Luckily, Joe was home, his home not mine, on weekends, so I’d see him and he’d call me too. I didn’t hear from Ryan for what felt like ages. Days turned to weeks, and I still hadn’t heard from Ryan. I knew he was busy with school and swimming. He had a very busy schedule. But wasn’t there a tiny bit of time to check in with his mom?

I didn’t want him to feel bad, but I was missing him so much. I really feel that this page is missing something. It gives a great example of me sharing one of the things that is the most important thing to me, one of the things that really matters, and that’s how much I care for my boys. Now, I’ll be the first person to admit that this journaling feels really vulnerable to me.

I’m not the kind of person that wants to admit that I miss my kids when they’re away. I want them to go off and have their grand adventures and I don’t want them to be thinking that I’m at home crying over it or anything. And so maybe I wasn’t crying, but I was feeling really vulnerable. And I was surprised by how strong those emotions of missing being around my kids was.

Well, Obviously, I’d been around them for the last 18 years, so I was going to be missing them, right? But I was surprised at my own strength of my emotion, and I’m so glad that I took the time to document it during that time. That time when I was actually vulnerable. And I could feel those emotions. Since then, the world has changed so much.

One of my boys is back living at home, the other is back living in our town, and they’re both working with my husband, and they both help me out with different things in my business. So it’s a really different time. And if I hadn’t recorded this story to share that piece of my emotions, of my vulnerability, that piece of the stuff that’s really important to me, and the things that really matter, I just wouldn’t have that.

And I think it’s really important to share that side of myself. Now, if the idea of getting that vulnerable and that emotional on a scrapbook page is a little uncomfortable for you, that’s totally fine. You don’t have to go into something that has sad and negative or, you know, kind of scary emotions.

Think about something that makes you really happy, something that is related to you. to those values, meanings, and purpose that you have. Maybe it’s around your family. Maybe it’s around being with friends. Maybe it’s around your personal development. Tell a story about one of those things and maybe something with a more positive spin to it.

That’s your task for this week. For week number one of this 10 part series, your first task is to tell a story about something that is super important to you, something that really matters to you. If you make a page like this and you wish to share it on Instagram, then please go ahead and tag me at Alice Boll or at Scrap Happier, which links right to the Scrap Happier podcast.

Before we wrap up today, I just want to tell you, we have opened up registration for our upcoming load challenge. Load 522 is called build your story. It’s our layout a day challenge that we’ll be doing in May of 2022, and it’s all inspired by architecture. So we’re going to be looking at famous architecture from around the world, and we’re going to be using inspiration from that to inspire our own scrapbook pages, our own stories.

Now, this Ties in so closely to what I’ve been talking about today, because one of the things that we do every day during load is we have a story prompt and a technique prompt. Now the technique prompt will just be something fun to get us getting creative and playing with our tools and our toys and our scrapbook products.

on our pages. But those story prompts really lead us into some interesting stories to tell on our pages. And for myself, it has been one of the very best ways to tell these random stories that I have in the back of my mind and didn’t even realize how great they would be to put onto a layout. Scrap happy members get access to all of our load challenges.

It’s completely free, it’s included in your membership. So you can check out Scrap Happy membership at scraphappy. org slash join. And if you’re not quite ready to commit to membership yet, you can always sign up separately for the load challenge and just take the challenge. So what are you waiting for?

Let’s build your story and scrapbook a layout a day in May. Registration is available at scraphappy. org slash load L O A D. The other big thing I have to remind you is that all through the month of April we are doing the Happy at Home series on YouTube. I go live every day at 1 p. m. Pacific, 4 p. m.

Eastern on the Scrap Happy YouTube channel and I share something fun about scrapbooking. So far this month, we’ve talked about rainbow stenciling, using large photos, foil and duo gel, layered stencils, the cool layered products from Pinkfresh Studio that include dyes, stamps, layered stencils, and washi tape.

We talked about no line watercolor, and we talked about watercolor backgrounds. And if you’ve missed any of the sessions you can catch them all on the happy at home playlist on the Scrap Happy YouTube channel or join me for the rest of them live this month. That’s it for today. I’m so glad that you joined me.

If you make a page that’s inspired by the things that are most important to you, that help you scrapbook your stories, then please go ahead and tag me on social media. I’d love to see what you create. And until next time, happy scrapping.

Oh, I totally forgot to tell you, you can see the layout that I mentioned, the missing you layout on the show notes for this episode. Just go to scraphappy. org slash episode 62.