No matter what your life looks like, you are the best person to tell your stories
The Awesome Ladies Project started as a creative self-documenting challenge in March of 2013 by me, rukristin: Feminist Scrapbooker. The Awesome Ladies Project challenges you to document your life on your terms. No matter what your life looks like, you’re awesome and your stories deserve to be documented in a way that makes you feel awesome.
The Awesome Ladies Project offers various creative projects to help women document their lives. The ALP exists to encourage and empower women to prioritize self-storytelling through creative means.It doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie or a seasoned pro; whether you’ve got just five minutes or can dedicate a whole weekend.
This place exists to help you tell your stories.
So what exactly is Feminist Scrapbooking anyway? Great question. Everyone’s feminism is a little bit different, and so everyone’s feminist scrapbooking philosophies are going to be a little bit different. For me, Feminist Scrapbooking is all about presenting yourself as an authentic protagonist. You are the person telling the story, it’s important that we know about you. The more we know about you, the more we know about the story.
For some people, Feminist Scrapbooking is going to help them step outside of their family scrapbooks and get some All About Me pages scrapbooked. For other people, Feminist Scrapbooking is going to help them get started scrapbooking their life in general. And for yet even other people, their feminist scrapbooks will look like art journals, photographs, little notebooks they keep in their bags, or whatever else feels authentically them. There is no wrong way to do this thing.
Feminist Scrapbooking:
- IS about scrapbooking the stories of your life
- IS for women of all ages, races, genders, incomes, ethnicities, sexualities, etc — Feminist Scrapbooking is inclusive.
- BELIEVES that all women’s stories are worth telling, no matter what your life looks like
- BELIEVES that there isn’t just one way to scrapbook your life
- BELIEVES in supporting businesses that align with our lifestyles (whatever lifestyle that may be)
- IS NOT about doing the trendy thing, just cause it’s trendy
- IS NOT about sticking to tradition, just because it’s tradition
- IS NOT about being forced to use corporate/big box supplies because of a lack of unique supplies better suited to the lives we lead
Feminist scrapbooking is the creative ownership of your story.
The bottom line is that Feminist Scrapbooking is about you being awesome and that coming through in the creative projects that you make about your life. It’s not any more complicated than that. You’re a totally awesome person. You have totally awesome stories. And those totally awesome stories deserve totally awesome scrapbooks.
Let’s make those scrapbooks together.
More about rukristin: Feminist Scrapbooker
A little bit more about me. So, I’m Kristin and I live in East Lansing Michigan with my partner Jeff. We moved here in 2014 where he’s attending Michigan State in a PhD program. I love it here in Michigan, especially summertime when I’m out in the garden and taking in all the natural light. I grew up in the North NJ suburbs of NYC (if you’ve ever seen the Sopranos, that’s where I’m from, those are my people) and I miss it, especially pizza, bagels, and my family.
I studied Political Science and Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University and worked at scrapbook shops, wrote & designed for scrapbook magazines (those were these sort of paper-like glossy book things with lots of pictures that came out periodically, back in the old days), and spent my spare time scrapbook blogging. After some not cool health problems (headaches) forced me to re-think my work/life plan; I turned to scrapbooking — the hobby that was always there for me throughout high school and college.In 2013 at the John Wayne Airport in Orange County CA, Jeff & I founded rukristin papercrafts and we’ve been growing the small business ever since. Throughout the years within this business, I’ve created project kits, come out with workshops, designed products, and so much more.
In late 2016, I decided that I wanted to grow even more and in order to do that I needed to focus on branching out towards something greater than myself — The Awesome Ladies. The Awesome Ladies Project was a challenge I had issued to a few of my scrapbook friends, to get themselves into their own scrapbooks. Far too many of us scrapbookers are not in our own scrapbooks and that just isn’t cool. Over the years it grew into a few larger challenges, then a full year’s workshop in 2016, a brand new community website in January of 2017, and this past June we just had our first live retreat. I am so proud of all the Awesome Ladies. The best part about being me is seeing the growth in you. <3