January 7, 2012

Studio Saturdays- Cringe Worthy ⁵

by Wendy • 2012: Renew, Art Journaling, Studio Saturdays

I can’t even believe I am putting this out there…it’s cringe worthy.  It’s awful.  I’m embarrassed.  I feel as if my Mom is rolling her eyes at me from the other side of the computer screen at this big giant mess of a scraproom.  The only reason I think that is because my Mom keeps an immaculately clean home.  And now that my Dad is retired, she has a ton of help keeping the house tidy.  She just left after spending nearly two weeks keeping my home spic and span (even though 5 adults and two kids were here).  Now that she and my dad have been gone for less than a week, the house is almost back to being a wreck.  Don’t cry Mom & Dad.  But this little space below has become my little cram room.  Anything and everything got stashed there and so after a few months of this routine, the room turned out like this:

It’s terrible isn’t it?  Pathetic…  Oh my goodness, you might need to divert the eyes!  Anyway, in order for me to start back up on my art journaling, I really need to contain this beast.  It has been on my ‘spring cleaning’ list for about 4 months now.  Being that this is the last day of the first full week in January, what better day than today to clean it up?

After we spent most of this beautiful day (it’s in the mid-70′s here in Houston) at the beach in Galveston and then out in our backyard, I got to work.  It overwhelmed me at first but I actually got it straightened up and organized pretty quickly.  I’m kind of proud of myself.  I shouldn’t let the cart get before the horse because I need to actually try and maintain it.

And yes, those photos at the bottom of the picture are photos from last February that I need to put into an art journal.  Why is it January 2012 again?

And then there is this:

It’s a huge bag of every little scrap of paper that I collected on our trip to New York back in September.  I really, really, really need to get these things into a memory keeping system before there the 2o year anniversary of 9/11.  I was going through all of the receipts and business cards and programs that I had collected and I just can’t quite figure out a way to archive everything.  Some of those things I feel like are pieces of history…at least it could be for my daughter.  I had planned on art journaling everything while I was there but I just never had time.  I’m kind of glad that I didn’t glue a lot of this stuff down just because it would have been a shame to not be able to look at both sides of some of these documents.  I don’t know if the Project Life system would be a great way to archive while adding a bit of personal element or just to leave them in a box.  If you have any suggestions, I would LOVE to hear them!  I have made it a goal to have these things in a book or archived in a system by the time the year ends.