2026: a year of blogging
One of my new year’s resolutions is to take up blogging! I’m aiming to post once a week this year. If you’ve taken the time to read this, hello! And thank you for the support. <3
I want to make my site a representation of me, like my cool little corner of the internet. To get off social media, since posting there gives me stress. To do more honest reflection, and create a catalog of my work that I can review in the future.
I didn’t expect this post to be so long, but once I started writing, I found myself reflecting on my history of hobbies. (Maybe this is why recipe blogs are always so long with personal anecdotes? Hmm.)
Today’s unintentional subject: scrapbooking
To the right, here is a decor page of my reading journal/scrapbook. I started this journal in 2024, and had some leftover pages, so I’m taking the remainder pages to write thoughts on my 2026 reads.
I love starting a new notebook fresh, but I’ve also found love for reclaiming an old notebook. Creating a clean distinction where a new phase of my life began, and adding to the timecapsule of a journal.
One of my favorite hobbies is collecting stationery and paper crafts, both for scrapbooking and for sending letters to friends. I didn’t always write so many letters, but in reflecting on my growth of hobbies, it’s been interesting to see the trajectory of my love for handwritten correspondence.
My mom has always been the master of a thank-you note (a fine example of southern gratitude), but as a teen I thought of it as a chore. Now, I see a similarity between how I write and scrapbook, to how I kept a sketchbook as a kid and young adult. Since I was eleven, I’ve loved keeping a sketchbook, and those doodles and brainstorming became a kind of diary in creative reflection. The way I write letters is a lot like scrapbooking — I spend just as much time writing a letter as I do decorating the card with stickers, washi tape, doodles, and even decorating the envelope. (Making sure to leave legibility for my postal worker, of course.)
My love of scrapbooking started with polaroid cameras + anime conventions.
In my early 20’s after college, I went to a bunch of anime and video game conventions. (Texas has a huge con circuit, so there was always a handful I could roadtrip to each year, and I’m still penpals with many of my con friends!) However, I went to so many, and made and re-wore so many costumes, that I would start get them mixed up in my memory. It gave me stress to think that a hobby I put so much time, passion, and money into would lose its potency/importance once the weekend was over. My solution: starting a con scrapbook with polaroids from my instax! More than just pictures of the conventions or cosplayers from anime I liked, these were candid snapshots of me and my friends, funny moments, behind-the-scenes shots, and silly memories from the weekend. It was also an exercise in reminiscing when I got to put the scrapbook toegehter in the weeks after the event — sticking selfies into a scrapbook (a pokemon-themed notebook) with con ephemera (my weekend badge, a map from the convention, stickers from fellow con-goers) and washi tape & stationery from the artist alley, it made me feel closer to the experience.
Nowadays, a reading journal is my perfect means for scrapbooking.
At some point my collection of pristine sticker sheets and curated paper scraps became overwhelming — so I started a reading journal in 2023, as an excuse to actually use the stickers and stationery I was collecting. A happy venn diagram that combines the hobbies I love with creative reflection time! It helps me remember the books I’ve read, too. Evidently there’s a common through-line with my memory and scrapbooking.
Above are a couple spreads from my 2024 reading journal! It was fun using the ‘library card’ theme to catalog my monthly books and star ratings. I began the journal in March 2024, and each month had its individual page spread, followed by individual book reviews. Magazine scraps, wrapping paper, stickers, washi tape — it’s all fun to play with and curate into a pretty canvas on which to lay my thoughts. Here are a handful of pages from my 2024 reads, with rambling reviews. <3
Until next week! Xo Caro