On kits and messes

I work 25-30 hours a week in a small scrapbook store in Newport News, and on my unexpected day off yesterday, I sat down with a few products I pulled on Sunday to make some more displays for the store. We got in some fun family-themed papers from Flair Designs last week, and those will be fun to play with, but most of my layout and card displays are set up to try to sell product that has been sitting around the store for months. Sometimes people just need to be reminded that this stuff is there and that it can be appealing to use.

But the kit I pulled to use yesterday—oy. We have a whole stack of these things; they’re kits from Deluxe Designs/Two Busy Moms in a variety of themes, and they have just been sitting in the store until I am sick of the sight of them. They are monochromatic kits and contain 6 sheets of double-sided cardstock, tags, a frame, mini tags, mini squares, alphabet stickers, etc. The idea is that you can make up to 6 scrapbook pages with each kit. I pulled the birthday kit to make samples with…it’s done in shades of dark blues. Now, there’s not a thing wrong with these kits, the quality is nice, the designs are bold and graphic, and the tags and sayings and stickers are nicely-designed, but people just don't get what to do with them. And I’m having a hard time jazzing them up. Anyway, here's a sample of what I came up with. (below)

But I am determined that, if I can get a couple of pages and a couple of cards up on the wall, with the kits underneath, so that the customers can see exactly what’s inside these kits and what they can do with them, maybe they’ll buy them and I won’t have to move them around the store anymore. Wish me luck.

On a semi-related note, I am SO SICK of the mess my photos have become. I’ve got film photos in boxes, digital photos on the computer in a million different files, and then my sister and sisters-in-law send me pics of the various kiddies, which I admire and then promptly lose. I know for a fact I have some cute shots of Anna and Evelyn that came in a few months ago, but not a clue where I stuck them. I just recently unearthed some pictures of Tanner and Kylie that my sister sent me a year ago. For five years, I was an organized scrapper—some might even say an anal-retentive scrapper—albums relatively up-to-date, negatives neatly organized, photos neatly filed. Then we moved to Virginia, and I finally embraced digital photography, and life generally got busier and messier, and there went my wonderful organization that I used to pat myself on the back for. And every day I get farther behind. I may have to forget ever producing anything publishable again, and just concentrate on getting the damn things scrapped.

Ugh. Time for some tea and a novel, enough of the scraproom mess for this afternoon.