Like most Americans, I have drawers, boxes, shelves and other respositories full of stuff I haven't used for years. In many cases decades. I oscillate between shame at my inability to throw these things out (as decluttering experts are always declaring we should do) and being glad I kept it. 

Today is one of the happy days in the second category. I've been trying to come up with DIY embellishments for my scrapbook pages, mostly disappointed at the commercially available packs and products aimed at scrapbookers (who are evidently an incredible goldmine of mindless spending for the folks who are making their living riding the back of this trend). I admit that I have been sucked into that commercial whirlpool and have spent some $$ on tools and materials. But before I went out and bought another little baggie of disappointingly crude "embellishments" or an expensive decorative punch It occurred to me to take a look at the residue of some of my abandoned hobbies. 

Well, look what I found in my box of old bento box supplies! Decorative punches for making little dots and starbursts out of sheets of dried seaweed! Yahoo!


And then, of course, there's that scary drawer full of random sewing and jewelry making embellishments, including at least a few things that are 2-dimensional enough to glue to a scrapbook page. Whee!







Starbursts and colored dots are always fun, but I'm still looking for decorations for the travel pages. I actually bought a little pack of those (only $3 at Joanns!) but found only a few of them usable - mostly they are clumsily drawn clipart of over-sized cameras and open suitcases in weird candy colors. Anybody have any ideas? Or some old magazines or travel brochures with small pictures that could be cut out and pasted to cardstock? 

So a text thread was going around among my female in-laws a couple of months ago along the lines of, "Hey, let's all get together for a weekend Craft Retreat!" They needed at least 10 people to sign up, so I impulsively said I'd come. I keep thinking it would be nice to get to know my very nice in-laws a little better - here's a chance to do it!  And since Richard and I skipped the state park tour last summer, driving across central Minnesota in the middle of winter sounded weirdly appealing to me. 

You know what a Craft Retreat is, right? It's when a bunch of people (mostly women, I'm guessing) rent a cabin or other quaint getaway spot and make quilts or something. This isn't one of those organized groups where everyone works on one project together - it's a Bring Your Own Craft (and maybe some leftovers from your liquor cabinet to share). I 'm thinking it's a lot like when the guys go Up North to the Hunting Shack, only with fewer guns and more show-offy quiches for breakfast.

I'm intermittently crafty, and it seemed like a long ways in the future when I signed up. Now it's NEXT WEEK and I need a craft in progress!! So I decided that I'd do some scrapbooking. I was pretty sure that some of the other ladies had  some experience with this and would be able to give me tips (and maybe some leftover materials). But mostly it was a way to make myself do something about the boxes and boxes of loose photographs and deteriorating albums scattered around the upper two floors of my house. 

So for the past week I have been lugging boxes up and down stairs and sorting sorting sorting. I have found many amazing things. Not only a few pictures of my childhood homes in distant states (something I had been looking for) but an amazing number of half-completed photo albums of various types. Most scrapbookers use enormous, unwieldy 12x12 albums that do not fit on any normal shelf and all look the same from the back anyway. I don't like that size, but I thought that's what you had to use, so I bought one at Michael's.

You can also get those awful magnetic page albums in various configurations, which are great when they are new but eventually dry up and start raining photos when you pick them up. I have a lot of those, some full, some empty, some in-between. But when I cleaned off the shelves in the office I discovered that some of the 8-1/2x11 size that I thought were pre-bound magnetic page are actually nice archival, post-bound albums that you can add pages to! I think that's what I really want to use. 

But I do have a use for that giant album. Those boxes of memorabilia that came to us when our respective mothers died have some wonderful old black and white photos that are way too big for the small albums. So I guess I'll use the big album for those. It's going to be a kind of thematic salad. Here's a Victorian-era portrait of a huge, glum-looking Swedish farm family (my ancestors). Here's one of Richard's Norwegian farm family during the 1930s, looking like something out of a Dorothea Lange exhibit. And here's a weirdly large print of me at age 5 with 2 of my younger siblings, all giggling adorably for the Sears photographer. But they all look GREAT on those 12x12 pages! 

I have now spent $150 at Michael's and Joann's on supplies, so I guess I'm committed. Anybody have any tips on scrapbooking?

I've been making masks obsessively. Still trying to find that perfect pattern while using up scraps of cloth and bias tape and elastic that I have been hoarding for years. I'm at the point where every mask is different since I am still experimenting, and most kind of rough. But I have arrived at a general design that I can now make quickly and am now ready to make some to give away.

If you need a cloth mask, or are making masks and would like to swap some, or just have sewing supplies to get rid of, let me know. I am running short of white thread and a few other colors. And nobody has elastic these days. What I would really like is ROUND elastic - hair ties or heavy elastic craft cord for making necklaces. I have some of the elastic cord and find that even pieces that look too thin actually work fine.

Here's a gallery of some of my designs on Google Photos.