Yep! It’s that time again! Time for another round of Layout a Day, aka LOAD as the regulars like to call it.
What exactly is LOAD? It’s a thrice yearly challenge to create a scrapbook layout every day for a month. The next one starts on May first. This will be the last public one for the year. (To participate in the third LOAD each year, you need to be a member of ScrapHappy.)
What’s so great about LOAD? Well, I’ve got lots of reasons to love it. (You can read them here.) But my reason for loving it today? LOAD gives me permission to make scrapbooking a priority in my daily life, but by participating in it, I also get to not feel guilty about not scrapbooking at other times of the year.
What does that mean?
Let’s put it this way. If I only scrapbook during LOAD, and make a scrapbook page every day of each challenge, that means at the end of the year I’ll have made 120 layouts. That’s 2.5 full albums worth of pages. That’s a lot of stories told. Especially if I continue to scrapbook, and continue telling stories, even after my kids fly the nest. If I live for another 30 years, that’s another 75 albums. 75! I’d have to have an entire wall dedicated to scrapbooks. Speaking as someone who’s had to clean out too many family houses in the past ten years, that’s a lot of STUFF for my kids to have to deal with.
So by participating in LOAD, I get a LOT of storytelling done, and that frees me up so I don’t HAVE to scrapbook at other times. (You’d think I scrapbook all the time based on this blog, but I don’t!)
Heh. Unlike a real marathon, where you have to train in order to successfully complete it, in a scrapbooking marathon, you’re not going to injure yourself if you just jump right in!
You could even, if you’re a multi-hobbyist, use the LOAD format to give yourself permission to concentrate on each of your hobbies in turn. That sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
One last reason I’m excited about LOAD this May. It will be round two of a Past Perfect theme, as far as the prompts go. What does that mean? A few years ago, we did a LOAD called Past Perfect, where we concentrated on telling our own stories, rather than that of our loved ones. It was one of the most fun LOADs I’ve done. We’ll be revisiting that idea this May, and I’m really glad about that. After all, the story we’re most qualified to tell is our own, don’t you think?
So. Have you signed up for LOAD yet? If you haven’t go do it right NOW!