Goals for a New Year…Papercraft Weekly!

The beginning of December many of us will be purchasing planning calendars for the coming year. As you sit down, looking at the clean blank pages, your thought’s may be filled with hope and anticipation of all the good things 2010 will bring. You begin to write some goals for the new year in the front of the calendar. Along with the usual suspects – exercise more and eat healthy … write in, “Papercraft weekly!” It’s probably already happening due to your tinkering around with some project or another, but, create a more specific challenge for yourself. Write objectives to measure your progress because a good objective is clear, concrete, and measureable. Apply this to your goal of papercrafting weekly.

Challenge yourself to make a card, a scrapbook page, or stampcraft project every week for an entire year. Each project has to be unique and stylish, and don’t allow yourself to make a bunch of projects ahead and just write the date on each as the weeks pass. The project has to be made in the actual week and dated. Work on a weekly project, even if you’re sick or tired or grouchy or busy. Little do you know the challenges that lay ahead and where the idea of papercrafting every week will lead you.

As 2010 begins, the first few weeks will go smoothly. When you encounter your first bump in the road you’ll somehow manage to fulfill your weekly project assignment. By encountering this bump you’ll find out you can papercraft in adversity – if you make it a priority!

The months will role on as you make projects every week, no cheating, no repeating. Meeting your weekly papercraft requirement becomes easier as you go along and, surprisingly, you won’t run out of ideas. You’ll become attuned to looking for unusual sources of paper, stamps, and embellishments. You’ll put no material restraints on your weekly project, so you can never use “But I don’t have the right stuff” as an excuse. And working small, you don’t need a lot of materials! Another advantage of the small thing size is that you can make them quickly. Some weeks you’ll spend less than 30 minutes on a project and I’m sure you’ve waisted more than 30 minutes a day clicking through the TV channels.

If you decide to do weekly papercraft projects for a year (or monthly), it is important to focus on the actual weekly doeing, not making a perfect, beautiful morsel of life-changing artistic achievement. Not all of your projects will be great examples, but they are done! A simple project made in a particular week could be compared to one from the previous weeks project and you’ll think the previous weeks project is far superior, due to the complexity of its construction. You may think the simpler project “shouldn’t count”, but they all have to count, or none of them can count.

By engaging in weekly papercraft projects for 2010, you’ll grow in technique mastery, gained confidence in your creative choices, and begin to truly see all possibilities in every week!

Paper Crafts Connection recent article called, Goovin’ with the Go-To Gals … Tales from the Scrap Pile may be all that you need to begin your goal setting weekly papercrafting projects for 2010! And if you’re going to shop online this holiday season be sure to visit the Crop Stop store’s huge sale of up to 75% savings on select items of limited quantities!

You love your husband and family, so you throw kisses at them all week. You like your coffee, so you drink some all week long. You call yourself a papercrafter or stampcrafter, or scrapbooker, so you must make projects every week!

The postal service is geared up and scurrying around for the card to package shipping frenzy of the holidays and a lot of my card buyer’s have asked what is the best way to mail their layered and/or embellished project. I always instruct them on the best way. Use either a bubble wrap mailer which is now available in an assortment of sizes, or purchase a box of bubble wrap to cut pieces to the size of your card - most stores carry a small box of it now. You may need to create an envelope slightly larger than your card measurements to compensate for this additional ”bulk”  and it’s always good to make it using a lightweight cardstock. Address the front side and/or flap of the envelope. Lay the “bubble side” atop the card front and insert the card/bubble piece into the envelope with the backside of the card against the front of the envelope because the postal service generally does their machine bar coding only on this side – this will lessen the chances of it tearing and make mailing it less worrisome.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving Day! DZ Doodlers, Diane & Kim