Me? Organized?

Over at one of my favorite scrapbooking websites, Two Peas in a Bucket, they have started the Organize Your Stuff Challenge, Round 6. This means participants who see it through to the end will again spend 29 weeks taking serious looks at the rooms or corners of rooms where they keep their scrapbooking supplies (and where some of them, in fact do their scrapbooking). In theory, by the end of the 29 weeks, they will have some very nice scrap rooms.

This is Round 6 because different groups of Peas have already gone through the process five other times, starting back in 2009. I signed up for rounds 1 and 2 with good intentions. Both times, the overwhelming amount of CRAP I had all over my scrap room left me feeling discouraged at Round 2, and I dropped out. I mean, the first time, we still had the dreaded and used one time guest bed in there. The second time, I was able to figure out that what I needed, instead of the departed guest bed, was a bookcase where I could put some of the things I used to store on the bed. I don't think I was able to buy that bookcase until about a year later, when I finally found one at Target that fit my budget. Because it fits my budget and was purchased new, you know it's not the sturdiest bookcase out there, but it is working so far.

However, I decided the bookcase is not sturdy enough to hold the growing collection of scrapbooks. So that really left two places for them. The clear full shelf under my scrap desk, and the closet shelf. New books are all eventually going to end up in that scrap desk, you see. The closet is for the OLD books. But the books in progress needed to be somewhere easier to get to than under my scrapbook desk. For a long time that was the floor. That made my scraproom look just as messy as ever, because with the books on the floor, I sometimes had trouble getting to other supplies that were more neatly put away.

Finally, a few weeks ago, I came up with my own solution. My large but not too large collection of loose papers are now in an accordian file cabinet that was mostly just collecting useless papers, some dating back to my days in the High Desert. (We moved to Riverside in 2005, and what is now known as Jurupa Valley the following year.) Because that file cabinet (just a little paper thing) has 14 dividers, I have been able to not only sort my paper by color, but do some further sorting within each color. I only had eight places to put these papers in its previous location, which is a set of stacking trays. Instead, about 10 of my scrapbooks are now in the trays. These are the ones I work on all the time (My Jurupa Valley scrapbook, my life in general scrapbook, and my granddaughter's scrapbook are the main ones, although a recently purchased scrapbook that's now in the bookcase will be joining the others in the trays just as soon as James is born.)

I didn't know the Two Peas Organize Your Stuff challenge would be coming back for Round 6. Rounds 1-5 came fairly quick, almost one after another, but the longer-term participants in those rounds were ready for a break after the last one. And break they did, for at least six months.

But it is back as of Sept. 10. And I'm glad, because this time I know Round 2 won't make me fling my arms in despair. I'm ready to get this room REALLY organized.

Week 1's challenge is simply to make a scrapbook page. Easy enough, but then you have to analyze how easy it was for you to find the things you needed to make the page.

I've done that now too, for both the page I had created on Sept. 9, and the one that I am almost finished with today. And I am happy to say that finding the most important thing after pictures, which is paper, was very easy to find. So were all the tools I needed, which was the paper trimmer, the glue, a pad of ink and a binder full of letter stickers.  And, in the case of today's layout, so were all the embellishments. I just need to remember the adage, "Everything has a place, and keep everything in its place."

One of the other very important things on most scrapbook pages, besides pictures and paper, is embellishments. The other is lettering, which technically means the letters used to write the title of the page and the story told on the page, a.k.a. journaling. Since the vast majority of scrapbookers either handwrite or type out on computer their journaling, lettering decisions USUALLY focus on letters used in a title. I am happy to say that in both of my recent layouts, those were easy decisions.

The layout I did on Sunday (actually Sunday and Monday) was a bit less easy to complete, and that's because I had trouble figuring out the embellishments. To begin with this layout is about Riverside Road Runners. The facing page in my book that is also about RRR relied on a clip art of a running shoe I created digitally, but I did not want to do the same thing on this page. So, I was looking for generic embellishments that said "summer," but were not of any theme in particular beyond that. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, nothing I owned in the way of embellishments seemed to work. That's usually my cue to go scrapbook shopping, but I only had time to go to the stores on Canyon Springs Parkway on the far east side of Riverside ( a large Michael's, a normal sized Joann's and a normal-sized Target). While things there were cute, not cute enough to make me want them. So I ended up making some embellishments from a scrap of paper. Yeah me!

Sometimes, that's not what happens after an unsuccessful embellishment shopping trip. I end up calling the page "done" and moving on, sans any embellishments. Then a few months later, I find something in my Could Be Much Better Organized stash that I had not thought of before. I don't know if my embellishments could be organized well enough to prevent that from happening, but I'm hoping to find out on Round 6 of the Organize Your Stuff Challenge.