yep, it's true. here i am.

not posting to my blog for 2 months might make someone worry, but that needn't be the case. i didn't feel like blogging, my photos aren't on my laptop and that's what i've been using mostly, so i didn't blog. but that doesn't mean my mental state was in jeopardy, i've actually been doing rather well.

my mojo, apparently heavily influenced by my state of being, has returned in force the last couple of months. i am having fun again. i believe God puts things in our life for specific purposes. not all things, but if you look at things with that thought in mind, you'll see many. it is up to us to figure out and best utilize what we do with those things to get us a little further along in this journey. i've had so many cool things happen lately, i think the one that helped me with my mojo the most was prepping for a class i'll be teaching in july at masterful scrapbook design.

as my scrapbooks have become more numerous, i've really struggled with the "stuff" factor. when i die, my kids are going to have to go through all the scrapbooks. i find myself asking if i'm really recording the important things or just the pretty fluff that will sell a product. i hate that i've even come to that point, but i have been guilty of doing a page just to promote. they are all still my memories, but the level of journaling i USED to do when i first started scrapbooking had slowly eased its way out of my day to day scrapping. it's OK to journal lightly sometimes, but i used to be more of a storyteller than a designer. my focus changed. then my whole year of struggles made that omission even more apparent.

enter debbie hodge, owner of MSD. she asked me to work on layouts and write ups for this class. the description is as follows (redundant, i know, but fun to say...):

Explore why we tell stories and how to tell them so they’ll endure: the old stories and the new, structuring and writing them.
with Celeste Smith, Audrey Neal, Emily Pitts, Karen Grunberg, Noell Hyman

when we teach classes at MSD, we are given specific assignments. this month's topic was one i KNEW i could do, but since i hadn't really been telling stories, i knew it would be difficult. i also knew it would be a very good thing for me. i decided i needed to change how i approached my scrapping. i wrote all the journaling out before i even pulled out a piece of paper. it was good. the stories started to come back. scrapping became fun. the layouts i have been making are the stories that matter again. they are pages that won't simply take up space. they'll tell my children and grandchildren stories. that's where i'd like to be.

i can only share a couple of the layouts right now, but when the class is over, i'll share them all. this one is an oft told story in our house. i have been meaning to put it on paper but the thing that stopped me in the past? if i scrap it, then it's done and i won't have any old stories to pull up from the past if i have a particularly fitting paper or embellishment i have to work with. i know. it's pitiful, but it's true. just writing this out now, i'm thinking, emily you'd never USE paper with meatballs on it, or an embellishment shaped like a meatball, so stop thinking that way! so true. so silly. so done.

  

the photo i used isn't from the meatball incidence, that was before the time of cell phone photos (not that i have a cell phone now that takes pictures, but that's another story...). but it's a photo from around that time, he was 4 or 5, he's all wrapped up in his favorite blanket, cute boy. great story. 

i'll share the other one later, more to talk about there than i have time right now. i do want to share my june sneaks for cocoa daisy, hello sunshine. i loved creating for this kit, totally fun! i got the main kit, wide brim, and the embellishment kit. i used them all, loved the ormulu flappers in the main kit, but the embellishment kit got the most use. those BG bits are awesome.

so, i'm back. i know i keep saying that, so maybe i'm not. but thanks for checking on me every so often.