Each Monday, I discuss my Scrap Happy project based on Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
The most challenging task in my Scrap Happy Project thus far, would have to be the second aspect of
remembering love: Don’t expect praise or appreciation.
Most scrapbookers can’t wait to share their scrapbooks with others. Most of us want to be told that our scrapbookers are beautiful, that others are glad we are compiling scrapbooks, or that our hard work compiling scrapbooks is acknowledged in a positive way. For most of us, this rarely happens. We have to learn to let this go. We have to realize a that most
people have no interest in seeing our scrapbooks. We have to find other reasons to create our scrapbooks or you will soon stop scrapbooking.
I see the task of not expecting praise or appreciation as having two sides:
- Realize that no one else wants to really look at your albums
- Ask a friend if you can look at his or her albums
If we want other people to look at our albums, then we should ask to look at other scrapbooker’s albums. Personally, I knew that most people are uninterested in looking at my albums, but through my dissertation research, I learned that most scrapbookers (in my sample) were really appreciative of someone taking an interest in their hobby and their scrapbooks (in other words, most scrapbookers find that few people are interested in their albums). This is one reason why I ended up viewing nearly three times as many scrapbook pages as I anticipated during my interviews.
On caveat of my point, is that if you have young children around, they love looking at scrapbooks. They especially love looking at pages about themselves or about other babies.
Overall, make the effort to look at other scrapbooker’s albums. They’ll appreciate it. And maybe, they’ll ask to look at your albums, too.
Related Posts:
- Scrap Happy: A Happiness Project
- Scrap Happy: Remember Love
- Scrap Happy: Email Photos (File Under Remember Love)
- Scrap Happy: Mail Photos (File Under Remember Love)
- Scrap Happy: Share an Electronic File of Photographs (File Under Remember Love)
- Scrap Happy: Child-Free Edition (File Under Remember Love)
Stephanie
Stephanie Medley-Rath is a sociologist and scrapbooker who studies scrapbooking and memory keeping. Scrapworthy Lives is a blog focused on her sociological analysis of scrapbooking, with a sprinkling of posts about Stephanie's own scrapbooking projects.
