Still Creative

I am no stranger to me-time. Daily, in between taking the kids to things like t-ball, swim lessons, and the library, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, preparing meals, showers and sleep, I try and find time to get creative. I knit, I read to stir up ideas, I bake, I garden, paint junk finds like furniture, and I scrapbook. All of these things keep me sane, keep me a functioning adult, rather than a mad-minded mom on a screaming spree.

I also find arting and crafting as a necessary part of my ideology of a woman. My grandma used her sewing machine, garden, and kitchen to create things like pillows, beautifully braided bread and fresh lemon used for cleaning or artfully displaying on the kitchen counter; my mom crafted from the time she was a pre-teen, even making her own snazzy short dresses in high school. She often wielded a hot glue gun for various reasons, and would take over my elementary school art projects with a dominating zeal. Her macrame was incredible. She made the candle-based centerpiece for our wedding, and still had a vibrant, colorful, garden.

I don't long for a career to measure my successes. I don't miss clocking in. I don't feel like any less of a woman for choosing not to work, and to raise my kids myself. I feel dauntingly proud, and satisfied with my life. If things never changed, and I never made a pretty penny, I wouldn't think any differently. Ideally, someday I'd make good money off my crafting or gardening genius, but for now, I'm honing my skills. And doing a million other important things like raising my kids and kindling my marriage, which is stronger than ever.

I have been disappointed with myself for not sharing more of artwork on the blog. In fact, while I maintain a very colorful garden blog, and even contribute a little to a blog about style and being pretty, I often feel like I could run a whole other blog about scrapbooking, another about knitting, and even another about diet and food. Alas, there is only so much time in the day. Despite the lack of New Year, or birthday as reason to make some all-important pledge to change, I'm commiting to share more of my art here, more often.

At some point when I started scrapbooking I got briefly jaded. I submited what I thought were my best pages to some magazines and never heard anything back. I thought that meant I didn't know what I was doing, and got very frustrated. I had completely lost sight of the reason I set out to make the pages in the first place, and just a few weeks later recommited to scrapping with a purpose, to share my stories with my kids and family in years to come. I came to find archiving my family life as part of my job as a mother, and my own personal contribution to history on a very small scale. For that reason, I never submitted anything again. I even stopped posting on sharing websites. But posting here, for my friends to see, is a whole different ballgame: one I want to play!

Here are some of my most recent layouts. I've been concentrating on simple pages with simple themes. Focusing on telling a story. As usual, you can click on the layout to enlarge it. Sadly, the pictures in the layouts are all from 2008, and I still can't afford to print any pictures. I have nearly $350 worth of pictures sitting on Walmart's website ready to printed when we get our taxes back next February. lol.

Happy crafting to you!