My 6 Year Blogoversary

Today marks my 6th year of blogging and as I have for the past four years I'm going to take this opportunity to reflect on my progress. Let's start with reviewing my goals for 2014.

1. Complete more off-the-page projects - I definitely achieved this goal, having created a mini-canvas series, two dream catches, a masquerade mask, table centrepiece and some tags. It's good to have the freedom to change it up from 12x12 works sometimes.
2. Complete (ahem, start) Lynda's wedding album - okay, so I STILL haven't finished this but I did at least make a start on it. I have all the photos printed and allocated to pages. I would say I'm probably about 1/3 of the way there. It's just really hard to get motivated to work on photos you don't know the background story to (especially when I could be scrapping my cute boy).
3. Continue to make time for scrapbooking even while pregnant/after the baby - It is definitely much harder to find time as I have a baby who does not like to sleep. I'm happy to have remained on some design teams which have given me motivation to keep creating, as I do still need the stress release. I would say this goal is a work in progress.
4. Win a major scrapbooking award at the Gold Coast Show - Despite the Show falling 3 weeks after Harrison's birth and only having created seven layouts to enter into the ten categories, I still won both Best Exhibit and Most Successful Exhibitor in 2014. I think this is a reflection that the standard of the competition needs to be raised. I know we have many wonderful scrappers on the Coast but it seems to only be 'Close To My Heart' consultants who enter so there is little variety in the styles.
5. Apply for Scrapbooking Memories Masters competition - I didn't get around to doing this, I figured I didn't need the pressure of more deadlines with a new baby. I did finally apply to the Kaisercraft Design Team after many years of admiring their team, haven't heard back about the result yet but I'm not hopeful after checking out lots of the other fantastic entries they have.

I think overall it was a fairly successful year of scrapbooking. Interestingly, I starting doing a major clean up of my craft room a few weeks ago (then got side-tracked by creating some new projects and it's back to looking like a disaster zone) which also prompted me to have a think about the way I had been creating. For some reason, trying to get blog hits had become a driving force in my scrapping choices, to the point I was picking challenges to enter based on how many design team members would visit my page and comment rather than which challenges I connected with the most. I thought about why I was scrapping, was it for external validation from people I didn't know? Let's be honest, I lot of those DT comments are nothing more than a cut and paste "Great page, thanks for playing at (challenge site)". I've made some friends through scrapbooking, but that's via being part of a design team and having regular contact and those people will always leave more meaningful comments for me. I think this year my focus is going to be more on scrapping what I want to preserve and it if fits in with a challenge then fantastic. If I only get a handful of visits to my blog then that's fine. With such little free time for scrapbooking I need to be creating for me rather than some perceived audience.

 

With that in mind, here are my goals for 2015:

1/ Scrap what I want to, without consideration of the visits or comments it may generate for the blog.

2/ Finish Lynda's wedding album - can't leave this hanging around forever!

3/ Try to generate some extra interest in entering the Gold Coast Show by other crafty ladies.

4/ Try to actually keep a clean craft room - I know I will fail at this but I need to find a way of keeping it more tidy.

5/ Keep making time to create - I need to remember that it's already to make time for me and to use my 'free time' on things I want to do, not boring things like cleaning the house.

 

So to compare the statistics of my blog over time (even though I just said I wasn't going to care about them any more!), here is a quick snapshop of my progress since I started doing these reviews in 2012:

 

Date	Pageviews	Posts	Followers
20-Apr-12	5736	264	50
15-Apr-13	26396	382	95
14-Apr-14	41240	454	98 (20 via bloglovin)
15-Apr-15	61571	541	108 (26 via bloglovin)

 

I hit a low point in visitors in January 2014, but July and August 2014 were close to record numbers. My most popular post is still Playing with Seals and Dolphins (not craft related), but my Alice in Wonderland Altered Tea Pot is quickly catching up.

 

So there you have it, a sum up of my yearly reflection. Do you set yourself any scrapping goals?