A Crafty, Slippery Slope, I Tell You

People, listen up.

Because last week, it finally happened.

Pigs flew. H*ll froze over. And Lady Gaga finally released a contemporary Christian album that topped the charts in its first day out.

Or, rather, I actually finished our wedding scrapbook.

It was a monumental event, really.

Because just 16 days short of our second wedding anniversary, I wrapped up the biggest craft project I've ever tackled.

In the afternoon hours of last Wednesday, I stuck my final photo onto colored paper and closed the cover, cheered on by my fellow Navy-wife scrap-booker Krystal and her five-month-old Trevor.

I was so excited, I may or may not have done a victory lap around my house, pumping the book over my head like an Olympic athlete with a gold-medal.

I'd finally summited my Everest.

Miracles can happen.

Still, lets face it: It took me approximately forever. In fact, if it hadn't been for a group of my dear friends here - Navy wives who meet every Thursday to work on our respective craft projects together - I never would have started back at it after my year-long hiatus from this behemoth of a project.

And because it took me about 1.5 years longer than it should have, I made a vow after I finished my victory lap.

I swore then and there - to God, Krystal, and Trevor - that I'd never scrap-book again.

It took too long, I whined. It's so expensive, too. And the incredible attention to detail it requires exhausts me.

Plus, I have to say, my attention span is not conducive to scrap-booking. I like projects I can finish in one sitting. And something that takes me two years to do? I hated that, every week, I didn't get the satisfaction of a job well done when I'd finally succumb to exhaustion, time after time, after having only finished 20 of the 58 pages I had to do.

No way; no how. I was done with scrap-booking.

And I meant it.

Done. Done. Done.

***

Which is why, just yesterday, during our weekly crafting party, I brought a project I could finish in one sitting.

With some wire, a borrowed glue gun, and some 50-percent-off craft-store finds, I made a fall wreath in under two hours.
I was pleased as punch.

Now that is a job well done, I thought. And it only took me a gazillion-th less of the time than that darn scrapbook took.

I was sold. Never again would I take on a project I couldn't finish in a day.

***

An hour later, another Navy wife came over. A pro scrap-booker herself, she carried a load of supplies, as always. She always has the best stuff, as she and her mother sell and demonstrate at scrap-booking parties.

As she walked into the room, she removed a huge chunk of colorful paper and stickers from her bag and plunked it down on my coffee table, exclaiming, "We're making room for more inventory, so if anyone wants this stuff, it's yours. Feel free to take what you need."

The room grew silent; we all eye-d each other. And then we retained our lady-like composures and refrained from attacking the stack like a pack of hungry, craft-happy wolves.

Finally, one friend braved the pile, picking and choosing what she liked gingerly. Another joined her.

Still, I refrained.

I commented from above: "I like that one."

And "Oooh, that's pretty!"

Plus, "Oh, that paper would be precious for a baby girl!"

But I refused to dig in.

After all, I was done with scrap-booking.

For all of about 15 minutes, anyways.

Because after the ladies were done, I sat for a moment, still as a dead night. Fighting, willing myself not to do it. Not to start something that would take me another two years to finish.

And then I promptly pushed all those long, painful nights of unresolved crafting angst to the back of mind and jumped on that stack like a dog on a bone.

I pulled anything and everything I thought I could possibly use. And more.

There was paper for baby albums. Stickers for Christmas albums. Stencils of numbers and flowers and hearts and stars. Child-themed packages. Solid-colored cardstock. Cut-outs that fit every theme of my scrap-booking dreams.

If - in my wildest imagination - I could find a use for it in the next 40+ years of life, I took it.

And with every paper I grabbed, my resolve flew a little further out the window.

Because not only am I making another scrapbook, I'm quite possibly making another seven scrapbooks.

A "Welcome Home, Baby" one.

A "Girl's Just Wanna Have Fun" one.

A "Our Time in the Navy" one.

A "This is Where I'm Putting Everything Random and Cute" one.

I've got approximately 25 years of scrapbook-ing ahead of me, I estimate, if I continue on at the pace I've set so far with my wedding album.

This is going to be very exciting. In a Watching-Ice-Melt kind of way.

Sigh.

What can I say? I'm apparently a glutton for punishment.

With the resolve of a grain of rice.

But at least I've got the scrap-book paper to match that.

***

Happy Weekend, everyone!

Not Me! Monday: The "Why Not Throw One More Log on the Fire?" Edition

Welcome to Not Me! Monday! This blog carnival was created by MckMama. Head over to her blog to read what she and everyone else have NOT been doing this week.

***

Due to what can only be exhaustion-induced semi-craziness, I decided NOT to hand-make all my own Christmas cards because I have NOT neglected putting together an actual photo holiday card like all the other big girls did NOT do well before the week prior to Christmas.

I also did NOT discard the fact that I had NOT averaged about three hours of sleep a night for the last week; that I did NOT break my toe; that I did NOT curse Al Gore himself when our home's Internet crashed on Wednesday.

No, I am NOT so senile that I would add one more burden to my already overflowing plate and decide to NOT cut, paste, glue, and bedazzle my own holiday cards less than a week before Christmas.

So, on Saturday, after NOT finishing all that work I complained about last week - Hallejuah! - I did NOT hit the craftstore and stock up on Christmas parchment, ribbon, buttons and felt.

Then, on Sunday, I did NOT wake up running a slight fever, so I did NOT decide to make the most logical choice when trying to nurse and heal from a cold:

I was NOT going to craft the heck out of it.

And so, I did NOT brew a pot of tea, boil myself some eggs, turn on a girly movie (the hubs was NOT at work,) and begin.

I did NOT cut ribbon.
I did NOT paste paper.
I did NOT tie string.
I did NOT glue buttons, and sew together felt like any sane, normal, pressed-for-time woman would.
And six hours late, I was NOT sitting amid a stack of red and green, silver and gold cards, all of them NOT different, all of them NOT unique.

And all of them NOT, distinctly, blank.
Not a one of them had been addressed.

Not a one of them had a poignant little Christmas message NOT inscribed inside from the hubs and I.

Not a one of them was actually close to being, well, done.

But my head was NOT pounding, my body was NOT aching, and my Christmas-card spirit had NOT run plum dry.

So I did NOT promptly put the calligraphy pen down and retreat back to my bed.

No way. No how.

I am NOT the kind of woman that would spend six hours crafting her own holiday cards through a fever, only to NOT inscribe and address a single one in time to make the mail for Christmas.
I'd NEVER leave such a big project like that unfinished. No way, no how.

Not me!

***

Thank you all for your good wishes last week!

My toe is healing nicely; my husband got the Internet in our home restored, and I finished the crazy workload I'd been stressing and losing sleep over all last week.

And - thank the Lord - I am finally on Winter Break! It feels so good - despite the head cold - that I'm in shock.

We're officially in Christmas mode around here, preparing to visit family, and loving it!

Hope everyone is having a wonderful (Not Me!) Monday! "See" you tomorrow!

It started out with the best of intentions...

A week after my wedding, my best friend and matron of honor basically put Hobby Lobby out of business.

She took advantage of one of their "Everything-is-75-percent-off-because-we-don't-think-anyone-will-actually-buy-it-because-in-reality-who-scrapbooks-anymore-anyway-when-you-can-make-digital-albums-for-pennies-and-a-whole-lot-less-work!" sales.

Well, Hobby Lobby, we do.

We did not save our invitations, cocktail napkins, dried corsages, wedding programs, and garters just to throw them in a box and forget about them.

We did not spend all that time collecting photos from the 100+ people who had cameras at our weddings if we weren't going to cut, crop and mount them to the point of unrecognizability (I think I made that word up.)

We did not meticulously re-apply lipstick every 20 minutes during our receptions so that when we paged back throw albums of our wedding day, we'd look picture-perfect in every shot, at every moment. (OK. I didn't actually do this. Which explains why I looked like a drowned rat by the end of our reception.)

We scrapbook! We do, Hobby Lobby, we do!

Sort of.

We scrapbook, in theory. We scrapbook, if we ever get around to it.

Seven months later, and I hadn't laid a single wedding photo in an album. Two years later, neither had my aforementioned best friend Sherri, who was married in the beginning of 2007.

It was time. Sherri had bought enough wedding scrapbook supplies that we could have made photo montages for all weddings occurring in the month of May. The box holding the supplies had taken up half of my storage closet since November. We had to do something about it.

So finally, this past weekend, we did it. We sat down (after canceling about 10 other appointments) and started the process.

It did take us about four hours to actually settle down and get started, mostly due to my stupidity, mentioned in yesterday's blog post.

But once we got going, we had our scrapbooking game faces on.
We started cutting and pasting and backing and sticking and pressing and silhouetting and writing like no other.

Sherri had a system going where she was literally lining photos up and sticking them, assembly-line style, to page, after page, after page.


It was true genius.

Me, on the other hand?

I was spending far too much time second-guessing my decisions.

(Pardon my general grossness. I'd just returned from the gym and was admittedly being a lazy weekend shower-er.)

I labored for an hour on two pages that were going to hold all the photos we took while wedding planning!

I heavily debated putting a photo in of my mom brandishing a casserole dish during a hot July afternoon when we were testing out wedding recipes for the reception (Mom, I'll have you know that did not put this photo in, but solely because of a deep fear you'd kill me. You're welcome.)

There went 15 minutes.

I seriously considered omitting a photo of my maid of honor, Blair, and I busting a move in our kitchen while testing out dance music (Sorry, Blair, but this made the cut. It was too priceless.)

Another 10 minutes down the drain.

I couldn't figure out a place to put the photo of my father, brandishing bifocals and needle-nosed pliers, helping Blair and Sherri make pearl necklaces for the bridesmaids. Curses.

Another eight minutes wasted.

This.was.taking.forever.

Especially when you considered I still had to work on the pages that would hold, and I'm not exaggerating: my bridal shower, my bachelorette party, the bridesmaids getting their nails done, the rehearsal, the rehearsal dinner, the morning-of-the-Big-Day set-up, the bridesmaids getting ready, the groomsmen getting ready (or rather, the groomsmen setting up the bar), the ceremony, the posed photos, the reception, the reception, the reception, the reception (lot of reception photos), the next-day gift-opening, and the honeymoon.

It was at this point that I looked up to find my living room looking like this...
Yikes! (Remind me to add a craft room to that sketch of my dream home.)

Let's just say that three days later, I'm still finding little sticky bits of tape and scraps of paper. It's as if a a carton of cardstock exploded in my living room, with the aftermath finding its way into couch cushions, under rugs, and in between the the toes on my dog's paws.

We'll still be finding scraps of the carnage for years to come, I'm fairly certain.

But, like bad soliders, we trudged onward, leaving all the fallen photos behind (I managed to weed out more than 200 photos that will get relegated to the overflow album with pre-slotted pages that will hold the wounded, er, I mean, the extras.)

I am happy to say that I managed to paste together 20 pages total. Here's just a few. And I am sorry for the crappy quality. I think I may make some high-resolution scans later, but I was just so darn proud of myself that I wanted to show the world I'd actually gotten some of it done!



But all pride aside, I still have a long way to go. A long, long way.

Guess what Teacher's going to be doing once school's out?

Let's just hope it doesn't take me until next year to finally finish.

Because it will definitely take me that long to finally clean up my living room.

Not Me! Monday

*On Saturday morning, I did NOT sit down to start my wedding scrapbook and finally remove the packaging on my wedding album, only to realize I totally did NOT have an album with the wrong kind of pages. It was NOT one of those albums that had the slip-in pockets for photos, instead of a blank-page album for cutting and pasting. I did NOT then learn that I really should open gifts and purchases I make right after I make them, and NOT eight months later, if I want to avoid debacles like this.

*Because of the erroneous scrapbook, I did NOT then have to make an emergency trip to Jo-Ann Fabrics to purchase another wedding album, which did NOT then lead my best friend and scrap-booking partner-in-crime and me to say, "Oh, what the heck. Let's get snacks and lunch at the grocery store. It's right next door to the craft store anyway." We did NOT then quickly return to my house, eager to return to the all-day scrapbooking party we'd planned, to find we'd locked ourselves out. We did NOT then call her husband, who went through a gift card and two bobby pins trying to pick the lock and break into my own home. We did NOT then realize we'd make horrible burglars and eventually gave up and called my husband at work, who had to leave to rescue us and bring us his key so he could let me back into my own house.

*I did NOT lose my car and house keys two weeks ago. I have NOT still not found them. This is NOT the reason why I am using the little spare key to the house to come and go from it, instead of my huge, jangly key chain, which is always easy to locate (until you lose it.) I did NOT forget that I had lost my keys and leave my little spare key in the house Saturday morning, resulting in the aforementioned Locked Out: Episode 1. I do NOT think there will be a Locked Out: Episode 2. No. I would NEVER make that same mistake twice. And even after all this, do you think I bothered to look for the missing keys, one more time? Just in case? Of course I did. Except, I didn't.

*On Sunday afternoon, my husband and I did NOT get to hang out with a close friend and her cute-as-a-button 3 year old. This sweet little girl does NOT love my husband. She did NOT run out of their car, give him a big hug, tell him she loved him and adoringly showed him her stuffed cat. She did NOT then run over to me, grinning widely, and as I bent down to get a sweet little hug from the little angel, she did NOT utter the fateful words, "My butt hurts." Apparently, I do NOT bring out brutal honesty in children.

* I did NOT have one of my most gifted students tell me today that he was strongly considering getting his GED as a 16 year old, so he could drop out and try out a little sooner for Riverdance.

* I also did NOT have to explain to a rather-out-there student that the hippie movement of the 1960s-70s was not started just because a certain group of free-spirited people didn't want to wear shoes.

Welcome to Not Me! Monday! This blog carnival was created by MckMama. Head over to her blog to read what she and everyone else have NOT been doing this week, as well as how her sweet baby Stellan is holding up.