6-Week Scrappin' the Stash Summer Challenge!

I've been thinking a lot about scrapbooking lately. I've been thinking about how complicated the whole process has become with all of the choices now available to us, and one word keeps coming to mind - OVERWHELMED! I have become overwhelmed with product choices and layout inspiration and sketches and trends. I am swimming in beautiful papers and innovative embellishments and alphabet stickers and ribbons and buttons and stamps and... and... and... I have hundreds of printed photos from years 1999-2001, 2005-2008, 2010-2011, and I have (literally) thousands of unprinted photos waiting to be tagged, optimized and printed from all of the other years. I have memories scribbled down on multiple calendars and notebooks (both paper and digital formats) and drawers full of ephemera that I'm hanging onto for my boys - the programs and papers and bits that speak of milestones and accomplishments and fun times.

This is all good stuff - there's just too much of it! In fact, when it comes to scrapbooking, the only thing that is not available to me in overwhelming abundance is TIME, which seems to slip through my fingers unless I make an intentional effort to capture it. These realizations have brought me to my own personal 6-week Scrappin' the "Stash" Summer Challenge! (Fun graphic, right?)

I want to scrapbook, but I find myself too overwhelmed with choices and products to find the energy to even begin most days, so I have intentionally decided to set aside some of my choices in an attempt to make it fun again. My goal for the next six weeks is to create 42 layouts. This is a fun experiment of sorts, and I have set my challenge parameters for the next 6 weeks as follows:

• Use only photos that I already have printed.
• Use only products that I already have in my stash.
• Use only (7) different sketches as layout inspiration.
• Select a specific 70-minute time slot to work on this project 5 days each week. Set a timer.

That's it! So, If you find yourself in the same scrapbooking boat, feeling overwhelmed with too many choices and products, yet missing the hobby that you have loved for years and wondering how to get back into it, then please consider joining me on your own 6-week Scrappin' the "Stash" Challenge. You can follow my parameters or set your own. The goal is to make scrapbooking fun again! I'll be back tomorrow with another post explaining why I chose the parameters that I chose (and I'll have my 7 sketches available for you as a free download). I'll be posting every few days throughout the next six weeks with updates on how things are going - what's working and what's not.

I'm also taking this challenge to TSR's Facebook page. I have discovered how to instantly upload photos from my phone to Facebook, so I'll be taking phone photos of all of my layouts and uploading them to Facebook. I think it would be such fun to see other people's layouts there as well. Since I got my smartphone, I have found that interacting on Facebook is pretty easy with the mobile app. Here is the link to our Facebook page.

See you tomorrow!

Tammy