Snippets Sneak Peak

Coming next month is a fun book by Lain Ehmann called Snippets: Mostly True Tales From the Lighter Side of Scrapbooking. Below is an except that many of us can identify with - I know I'm guilty of spending hours drooling over other artists' spaces! (comment with your own stories!)
Jenn

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

I’ve got a shameful secret. It involves spending long hours cruising the Web, looking at enticing photos that cause my heart to race and my breath to quicken.
Fortunately, this habit doesn’t require a valid credit card number or a parental warning on the computer screen. All the same, it’s a bit embarrassing. But, we’re friends, right? So here it is: I’m addicted to other people’s scrap rooms.

The level of my dedication is nothing short of scary. I can spend hours breathlessly clicking through link after link, drooling while I bookmark sites and save particularly provocative photos to my hard drive. Forget about Internet romances; I’m having an emotional affair with a Pottery Barn desk-and-bookshelf combo I saw online last week.

The idea that some scrapbookers have perfectly organized workspaces—complete with matching furniture and coordinated storage containers—is as far from my reality as my waistline is from Nicole Richie’s. It’s astonishing to me that people have scrap rooms large enough to host a dozen friends and their Cropper Hoppers, with room left over for a few full-spectrum floor lamps.

Okay, so I’m jealous. I live in Northern California, land of the silicon computer chip and the million-dollar “starter” home. Real estate is at a premium, and the price tag on my ideal scrapping space would have as many zeroes as a college tuition bill. And while I’d gladly trade my kids’ future for a room of my own, my husband has me on a tight leash.

As a result, my scrap room is more of a “scrap broom,” as in “broom closet.” Exactly how diminutive is my room? Let me put it this way—the previous occupant of our home used this space for handbag storage. And the only way I could host a friend for a crop night would be to suspend us both from the ceiling in hammocks, Gilligan-and-the-Skipper style. Not only would that be a tad bit uncomfortable, it would also make it really hard to set an eyelet without cracking someone’s coconut.

I’m not complaining, though. I know some women who are forced to house all of their scrapping paraphernalia inside a single armoire. Now, an armoire may sound fancy,
but it’s really just a French word meaning: “place to shove all your junk to keep it out of sight.” The idea of having to pull everything out and put it back again each time I want to scrap is enough to keep me using magnetic photo albums for the rest of my natural-born life.

Maybe someday I’ll have that dream room, the one with the cute white furniture and 12 x 12 file drawers. In the meantime, I’ll stick to my voyeuristic tendencies, envying other women’s floor space and wondering how they keep their desktops so clean. Seriously, how can you scrap without generating the least bit of clutter? You know, I bet they stash away those itty-bitty paper slivers, hole-punch chads, and unsorted products just long enough to take a nice picture—kind of like how I suck in my stomach and lift my head for the camera, and then let my chin rejoin my neck after the flash.

Honestly, you never really get a good look at the rest of the house in these photos, do you? All you ever see is the “scrap room.” For all we know, they have all seven of their children piled into one bedroom, clothes bulging from the closets, the older kids sleeping under the beds, while the little ones doze in the dresser drawers.

Actually, that’s not a bad idea. My three kids don’t need all that space—after all, the only thing they do in their rooms is sleep. And now that I think about it, why
do we need a living room and a family room? If we just consolidated a little, I’d have more scrapping room than I’d know what to do with. My husband won’t mind if I use his half of the closet, either. If he needs someplace to put his clothes, I can always get him an armoire.

© CK Media 2008. excerpted from “Snippets: Mostly true tales from the lighter side of scrapbooking”