Staying true to myself

9:59 AM Edit This 2 Comments »

Last night I just had to pick up the phone and call Maryfrances to fill her in on the latest industry gossip. Nothing all that exciting, and nothing that I wish to promote publicly because it's all trivial truly but that brings me to what is on my mind today. This is one of the things I discussed with MFF last night - that as I was learning digital scrapbooking, I thought it would be really cool to design my own papers and elements, and sell them online at Maryfrances' website: Scrapbooker Online. I have a kit ready to go yet something is keeping me from taking that next step.

It is the same kind of thoughts that took me out of selling my scrapbook pages and projects on Ebay. To be designing digital kits and/or selling pages made for other people would be taking me away from what I truly love about scrapbooking, and that is creating pages that tell a story to me, my friends, and my family ABOUT me, my friends, and my family.

Take me away from the complete process, and I'm not a satisfied scrapper. Take me away from that focus and I'm not a happy scrapper.

Here I have been thinking wouldn't it be great to be the next Heidi Swapp - complete with my own product line and all - but I honestly, when it comes right down to it, I wouldn't be happy being Heidi Swapp being pulled in all different directions.

When people talk about how they started scrapping, usually they got into it as a hobby. Not me, I got into it as a way to be an artist, a way to make a name for myself through creative expression. Yet time and again, I find myself reigning myself in, in order to stay true to what really satisfies me. I look back to what I was doing back in 1999, taking tons of creative writing courses locally at Writers & Books, and adding photos to my typed autobiographical stories. I am still doing that only I have added visual artistic expression to it with patterned paper, pre-fab embellishments, and a lot of glue.

2 Share your thouughts:

Maryfrances Fabbri said...

Hey Lady,

Nice chatting with you last night. I am in agreement with you, that we can't loose site of why we want to scrap. First and formost we need to do this for us and what makes us feel good as a person and artist.

Take time to smell the roses, let your creativity bloom. Let the world see you and what you have to offer. What to do with it all will come, at some point, and when it does you will be pleasently surprised.

You are on the write road. Where it leads may not be known yet. But getting thier should be half the fun!! HUGS!

Kristy said...

I think MFF said it very well. My thoughts....

If you become the next Heidi Swapp but your not happy you will not be doing what you love anymore. Take it easy on yourself. Do what you love and if and when the time comes for you to venture out into the big industry you will know. It will feel right!