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I am just getting back into paper crafting after a long hiatus. This is the first scrapbook layout I made since, I think, sometime in 2009ish or maybe 2010ish. I have a lot of catching up to do -- like I'm trying to document more than a decade's worth of adventures in about ten minutes. Wish me luck with that?

In 2008, my husband Mike and I were living by the beach in Santa Barbara, California. I was working at my dream job designing fabric for a local sportswear manufacturer. In my free time, when I wasn't at the beach (which was a three-minute's walk out my front door), I had been learning to scrapbook and was working at building craft websites. My husband was working as a sales and marketing manager for a local audio-visuals company. Life was just about as perfect as it could be. Those were fun times!

Then along came the Great Financial Crisis. My husband and I both lost our jobs, and we realized we would be homeless in less than 6 months if we didn't take action.

We made a list of all the things we could do, and none of them were ideal. But we had to make a choice as to what we'd do next, so in the end, we picked the craziest thing on the list. We used our savings to buy a sailboat, and we moved aboard it. Then we went cruising.

We didn't maintain any residence on land, and we also didn't even have a permanent spot in a marina to dock our boat. We went totally transient. People, this was just about the craziest, scariest thing I have ever done in my life -- but it ended up turning out okay. In fact, it was better than okay; it ended up being the adventure of a lifetime.

In the beginning, we cruised the California coast and the Channel Islands for a few years. From that experience, we got to be fairly proficient sailors. Then we decided we'd try for an even more amazing adventure crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea to explore Europe and the Middle East.

Now it's time for me to scrapbook the adventure. This is going to sound silly but I'm actually feeling scared out of my mind about doing this. Which is royally dumb! Scary is encountering a violent storm and gale force winds when you're two weeks offshore and there's nowhere to go (and yeah, I've been there, done that, and was utterly terrified!) but putting pics in a photo album, well, there shouldn't be anything even remotely scary about that.

Yet, dumb or not, there is no denying that this project is scaring the living daylights out of me. I have been mulling over why that is, and I think it comes down to a couple of things:

Its a huge project; while I've made scrapbooking projects before, none of them were this massive. I have a history of not finishing every project I start, and this big of a project is overwhelming.

And, beyond that, I want this to be amazing, and I am scared that maybe my skills aren't good enough for the job.

Thing about me is, I am prone to getting scared at really dumb stuff, but I don't let it stop me from doing what I want to do.

When I first started scrapping more than a decade ago, I spent about a week looking at projects here and at 2Peas, plus reading Creating Keepsakes magazine, plus staring at a blank piece of cardstock in literal terror. I was scared then, too! I know, this is completely ridiculous, but I was really scared.

I'm now working as a freelance writer, and I've heard other writers confess to feeling fear as they stare at a blank computer screen or a blank journal page. I guess the fear I'm feeling is similar to that. Creativity can be scary...

Last time this fear gripped me, I overcame it and made scrapbook layouts -- lots of them.

And this time around, when I held this spectacular scrapbooking paper in my hands, I felt intimidated at the thought of cutting into it. I had the mad urge to file it in my paper organizer, crawl into bed, and take a nap instead of getting started on my epic scrapbook adventure. But I swallowed that feeling and made this layout anyway. So here it is.

Here you can see my husband, Mike, preparing to refuel our sailboat, Viva, in the marina in Santa Maria, Island, Portugal. I don't have any journaling on this page because I haven't written it yet; I am planning to make mini albums, and journaling will be in there somewhere, when I get that far.

I used paper from Graphic 45s Catch of the Day line to scrap these pages. I'm not sure I did the paper justice. It feels like my crafting skills are horribly, awfully rusty. But I have several thousand pics I want to scrap (and I'm actually not kidding -- that's a conservative estimate on the number), so I'm diving in and getting it done despite my scared / rusty status. I sure hope this gets easier!


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