Stop consuming, start honing: 365 Crafting Challenge

I've been having a little crafty-self-check lately. The internet is amazing and inspiring and overwhelming and a soul-sucking black hole. Can I get an amen?! I have found myself scrolling for days and making nothing. Being so jealous of others crafters greatness that I'm not able to make my own unique creations. I have found I am flitting from topic to topic, idea to idea. Spending money on class after class. Pinning pin after pin. Buying product on top of products on top of expensive products. Coveting. Blankly staring.The last time I felt this was happening, Caylee and I were chatting about how we kept buying classes and never used them. We had just bought the new (and insanely phenomenal) A Beautiful Mess 52 Weeks of Art Journaling class and hadn't used it and were already scoping out new classes. So we decided to change that. We would create 2 pages a week, share them on our blogs and link to each other as accountability. That's all we wanted to do: CREATE. We decided to stop consuming materials, classes and ideas and starting honing our art journal skills. 5 months later, we have over 50 women in our art journaling community creating and share pages weekly. We never intended for this to happen. But constant creating and community building is contagious. Now I am in throws of the second longest running consistent project I've ever taken on (second only to Project Life). I create something unique every week. And I love it. I have grown so much, personally, creatively, community wise and blog/instagram wise. Its been the most unexpected turn I could ever have imagined that was born out of the simple desire to commit to creating. I've been listening to the Sean Wes podcast non stop the past few weeks and their tips and my latest evaluation of my time has got me thinking its time to take a turn in a new, narrower direction again.Then yesterday, as if she read my mind and answered all my prayers, Sabine posts this bad boy:  It is exactly the action step I needed.My goal is to STOP CONSUMING AND START HONING.As in my skills, interests, activities, what I'm sharing, what I'm consuming, etc, etc.How I'm going to do that: 

• Schedule my content more: x number of travel posts per week, x number of craft posts, x number of personal posts
• Curate my content: beef up my DIY tutorial posts, create more travel guides
• Streamline what I share: more DIY pics on instagram, daily sharing for consistency
• Focus to become an expert: on certain projects, skills, ideas and pursue them like a madwoman until I have mastered them completely or completely hate them and can go no further
• Establish habits of habitually creating: Create something everyday for 365 days (in hopes of creating a lifelong habit of daily creating)
• Set routines: my goal is to print photos every week to stay caught up on Project Life and other things like this to make it easier to actually create, etc
• Clean up: Clean up my workspace EVERY DAY, keep my inbox organized, narrow my focus on projects instead of having 10000 tabs open at once on totally random, unrelated things
• Plan ahead: I am lucky to have some time to create outside of the home, but that takes planning and preparation
• Use my stash: always and forever this is every crafters goal
• Set bigger goals: see my 100 Rejection Letters project 
• Monitor my time: If I can spend an hour mindlessly scrolling Pinterest, then I can spend an hour actually making something

So to document, to encourage and to hold me accountable I am going to participate with Sabine in her 365 days of creating challenge.  Read all about it here.  Ill be using her hashtag and my own #laurenmakes365 so I can organize my photos. We would love for you to participate and please use the hashtag so we can see and encourage each other! If you want to join in on the fun let us know so we can cheer you on!Neither of us are committing to sharing a photo every day, because no one wants to see that. But I am committed to taking a photo a day and logging it in my Collect app album labeled Craft365, for my personal record and accountability. I am not going to set ridiculous expectations of creating every day actually. A huge part of my lifestyle is traveling, hence the travel portion of this blog. But I do consider photography to be a part of my creating process and that will count for those days. On longer trips I plan to take travel kits, see my Project Life travel kit here, so that creating something is a possibility. Even if I only take a hole puncher, I am building the base of a minibook as I collect memorabilia....This challenge is not about rules or finishing a project every day. It's about accountability, growing and making. Making. Making. Making.So watch out world (ok, instagram), I'm about to flood you with awesomeness oozing from my crafty fingertips.