Scrapbooking, Differently: A Year-End Reflection

Back in January, I announced on my YouTube channel that I intended to “scrapbook differently” in 2025. At the time, I wasn’t sure what that looked like, but I knew I wanted to change up what I had been doing. 

The turning point came one afternoon in late 2024 while organizing my closet and stumbling upon boxes filled with untouched scrapbooking supplies collected over the years. As I sat there rifling through countless papers and embellishments, it hit me how much of my creativity had been boxed in by the need to use these products in perfect combinations. 

I realized I wanted to incorporate more journaling on my pages, feel less pressure to follow design rules, and use up the product stash I’d accumulated over 20 years of scrapbooking. It was not just about clearing space in my closet but also about freeing my creative soul. 

I also knew I wanted to change the direction of my business, which, up until that point, had been focused on scrapbooking with Cricut, an area I felt was neglected in the world of paper crafts.

​But the biggest question I kept coming back to was this:
How can I help my subscribers and customers tell their stories more easily, authentically, and simply—without worrying about rules, product constraints, or creativity blocks?

• How do we ensure the tools and materials we use support our stories rather than overshadow them?

• How do we create pages that reflect who we are, not what a scrapbooking company or designer says they should look like?

In short, how do we keep our pages real?

These questions stayed with me because I could feel a shift in my own work. My pages had become performative.

When I first started scrapbooking, journaling often filled half the page.

But after joining Close To My Heart as a scrapbooking and stamping consultant, my focus shifted. I was creating pages designed to showcase products (layers, embellishments, and techniques) rather than myself.

Even after I stopped being a consultant, those habits stuck. I still loved the products and enjoyed playing with them, but the pressure to create perfectly designed pages drained the joy out of the process. My pages had lost their heart, and I came close to losing interest in scrapbooking altogether.

​I realized that, as scrapbookers and memory keepers, we’ve become so product-focused that we’ve lost the point of scrapbooking altogether—telling our stories and preserving what matters. The pressure to make pages look perfect stalls our creativity instead of supporting it.

It’s easy to compare our work to what’s trending online and think, I can’t do that. We buy products hoping they’ll spark creativity, but they end up untouched in a closet. Add the stress of everyday life, and doomscrolling feels easier than creating, even though it leaves us feeling worse. Eventually, guilt sets in, and we stop creating altogether.

So after months of experimentation and my own soul searching, I realized that:

• I don’t need any more product.  I have enough to work with (though I will occasionally indulge in shopping for new stuff).

• I want to create, on my own terms, in a way that feels natural and easy.

• Making time to create is self-care.

• Telling my story, my way, is important to me at this stage in my life, and I want to help others who feel this way do the same.

• I still love teaching scrapbooking, but I don’t want it to be tied to another company’s product, especially after the product stops working! (e.g., Cricut, but that's a story for another day).

I know I’m not alone, particularly among longtime scrapbookers with decades of supplies, full lives, and far less patience for pressure and perfection.

Out of all this questioning, I realized I needed something practical, not another philosophy, but a way to actually start. So, over the summer, I developed a system I call Pages in Progress™.

This system is designed to help scrapbookers and memory keepers reclaim the heart of their pages by starting with the story when capturing a memory. When you begin with the story, the heart of the moment surfaces first, and the design follows naturally.  The Pages in Progress™ Creative Journaling Prompt Deck and the Gratitude Journal for Memory Keepers are based on the story-first concept.

​The deck is like a game: you mix and match Theme, Story, and Technique cards to tackle the blank page and see what stories come forth.  The prompts in the gratitude journal help you to appreciate the big and small moments.  But the ultimate purpose of both is to help you get your story on the page, without regard to product or rules.  It’s the ultimate permission slip to scrapbook your way.​

In the coming year, I’ll be exploring story-first on my YouTube channel and in the Pages in Progress newsletter. In January, I'm kicking off the year with a gentle Creative Reset.

We’ll cover:

• Scrapbooking rules I’m leaving behind

• Decluttering your stash to support your creative practice,

• My step-by-step approach to designing 15-minute page layouts using prompts from the deck, and

• A peek inside my creative workflow
  

  

I’m also really excited to launch a recurring scrapbooking/journal with me video series, where you can experience all that the story-first approach offers and adapt it to your own memory keeping.

To make this journey even more accessible, I invite you to join me for these special, interactive sessions where we’ll create 15-minute layouts together live. This will allow you to dive right in and start your own story-first scrapbooking journey with ease. 

I will keep you in the know when these videos are released. I also encourage you to subscribe to my channel, @thescrapbookschool, on YouTube so you can be notified when these videos are published.

I’m looking forward to sharing all of this with you in the coming year, and I can’t wait to hear your thoughts. I’d love to know what’s been working for you in your own scrapbooking practice—and where you’ve felt stuck.

Your stories and insights matter, and they help shape where this community goes next. Feel free to comment below or reach out to me directly.

Have a happy and blessed 2026!