July 13th, 2008

Finally started some reorganization of my scrapping supplies. Why now? Well, we've been re-thinking our use of the "office" here - because really, we use it as a room where stuff gets dropped in the middle of the floor and little work of any sort can be done. As much as I love the space I've got on the dining room table for my scrapbooking, it's perhaps not the most convenient place to keep papers and such. We savages eat at the coffee table when it's just Brian and me, but I have to do a lot of shifting and clearing whenever we have guests. I want to have a space that's dedicated to creativity where food and drink spills won't be my biggest fears. So, the office will get a makeover and a new purpose - to be my creativity studio. (Sounds better than office, I think.)

After I organize my stuff.

Now, I'm not necessarily good at organizing, or really, at staying organized. Or at keeping surfaces clear. I like a little clutter, to be honest. Gives a place a home-y, lived-in look. I've never really aspired to perfect, magazine-cover neatness. But lately, I'm starting to feel like everything should HAVE a place, even if it doesn't live there all the time. And like should live with like. So my widely-scattered scrapbooking stash needs to be re-figured to stay in the office/studio, all together, ready for me to create in there.

But my supplies spilled out of the office because they didn't all fit in there in the first place. I'll put some new storage solutions in there when I fix up the room as a studio, but really, I need to pare down my piles of stuff. Stop being such a scrapbook-stuff-collector. USE the items I buy. Donate the excess.

That brings me to the photo below. It's amazing what you find when you dig through stuff you haven't looked at in months. I'd totally forgotten about these transparencies, and the stickers and other things piled underneath. Pretty, no? I love transparencies!



As for donating the excess, I have a few possibilities in mind. I can:

• bring supplies to a local hospital that scrapbooks with patients/families (like North Shore here on LI, which has a program that creates scrapbooks with the families of NICU babies who're too ill to go home right away)
• send supplies to a soldier who scrapbooks (and can't shop for fun goodies while serving a tour in Afghanistan or Iraq)
• mail the supplies off to a non-profit like Send Love Today, which does papercrafts to brighten the days of terminally ill cancer patients

It's looking like I might do all three - I've got so much more stuff than I really need!