WIP Wednesday :: December Daily

It’s interesting to me, that the longer I do this crafty thing, the less prescriptive I am in my expectations of myself. I have always struggled with perfectionism, to the point of complete stoppage on projects, leading to creative freeze. It’s something I’m working on though.

I’ve shared a bit about my struggles with my 2022 December Daily album. Since then, I’ve made exactly zero progress. I tidied up my craft space, and left the boxes of supplies out, trying to encourage myself to get it done.

Spoiler: I continued to not touch them.

I will confess, I wanted to slip into old habits. It’s over two weeks since the start of advent, why bother trying to catch up now? But it seems personal growth is a thing around here, and I gave myself a stern talking to. Was it going to take a bit of work to catch up? Yes. Do I love having those albums every year to look back on? Definitely. Ok then it’s time to suck it up buttercup. Was it worth trying to push on with plan A? Hard no.

This is our third Christmas in our cabin. Three Christmases of trying to fit a tree into an already cramped space. Three Christmases of limited corners to hang our crafty adventures. Three Christmases of all our summer holiday fun layered on top of each other, not spread out across a large living room. Three Christmases, that should have been one. There are still many things I love about tiny house life, but trying to juggle All The Things At Christmas Time is not one of them.

To keep going with my original plan would require some level of visual clutter for the next two weeks. On top of lego in front of the lounge and trains in front of the kitchen and the tree in front of the fireplace, my brain could not handle any more “stuff” in my line of sight. It was time to admit defeat.

The Little Golden Book, the gelli print papers, the paints and stencils, have all gone away. Maybe next year, I will have a house, and revisit the project. Right now, in this moment, it is not the right project for me. Plan B is well underway, and despite three sick children and me coming down with what they have as well, I’ve already surpassed where Plan A was up to.

Approximately three million years ago, when blogs were still A Thing, I followed Cathy Zielske, and loved her clean and modern digital memory keeping style. At the time, digital scrapbooking was more often fussy and an attempt to recreate physical scrapbooking, and not really my style. Plus the screen time thing – I love blogging, I love podcasting, I love writing, I love photo editing. I find though, if I spend too long at the computer, even if it’s doing something I enjoy, I come away feeling unproductive and like I’ve wasted my time, even if I haven’t. Maybe it comes from being an elder millennial, where Computer Time was a thing and not something that I had access to constantly? Maybe it’s a result of not actually having anything tangible to touch and feel at the end of whatever it is I’m doing? Maybe it’s a sense that what I’m working on shouldn’t take as long as it has? A blog post only takes five minutes to read, according to my front page. Why does it take me an hour to write and format and prep and publish?

At the time, I downloaded her template freebies as she offered them. They’ve languished on hard drives and computers ever since. If there was ever a time, I thought, for me to embrace digital memory keeping, now it is. So I pulled up the templates and threw them into photoshop. There’s three different layouts, sized at 6×8. It was satisfying to watch the pages come together and my photos replace colour blocks.

Not all of the photos are great. Few of them are taken on my proper camera – most are from my phone (I have the iPhone 14 Pro and the camera is better than many point and shoot cameras I’ve had over the years). The goal here isn’t perfection though, it’s capturing a moment. I have only two more Christmases after this one with my biggest boy at home. Two. That’s almost nothing, and will be here and gone before we know it. It is a number that has made me more determined than ever to push through my own blockages and make sure this album happens.