Ooooh, crafty

Since I had our daughter in January, things have changed a lot. The usual changes - sleep, priorities, general organization of the house - were guaranteed to happen.

The one thing I didn't expect was an overwhelming desire to start crafting. And not simple crafts, either.

I've already pressed several flowers from our gardens to do shadow boxes. I'm planning on clipping fern and tree leaves to do a series of 'paintings' - basically just pressing the leaves into paint and then pressing them onto canvases. I'm going to start collecting paint chips (free!) to do some sort of collage. I've to a bunch of little wooden decorations (mainly animals) to colour for magnets, wall decorations or general knick-knacks.

There's still a couple of cross-stitch projects I need to finish that I started before she was born. There's a quilt I want to do this fall. I have a box of foam flowers and panels I've had sitting in a bag for months collecting dust.

One thing I will not do is scrapbooking. I don't understand it. I don't see the need to spend so much money on paper and little paper decorations for pages that hold one photo. When I was growing up, scrapbooking was something we did in school and all it involved was cutting out an article from the newspaper and taping it into the book with a little summary we wrote beside it. That's it. None of this fancy-schmancy lettering and stamps and cutters for us, oh no. All we had was lightly drawn lines so our summaries were written on somewhat straight lines. That and tape that dried out and yellowed within a year.

I don't begrudge scrapbookers. Everyone needs a creative outlet, but scrapbooking is not mine. No way, no how. I'll stick with my clumsy attempts at kitchy little things instead.