Category Archives: beginning scrapbooking

Aug10

A Quotable Life: Catching Your Family in the Act

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A Quotable Life: Catching Your Family in the Act

One of the things that I have always loved is the way people say things. If you’re paying attention, you’ll find the people around you saying things that are funny or profound or just wonderfully phrased all the time. As a writer, I’ve been saving these quotes for a long time, since they’re wonderful windows into character creation.

As a documenter, aka a scrapbooker, saving these quotes are a great way to capture the personality and interactions of your family. (And friends too, but we’ll talk about them at a later point.)The things people say show you how they look at the world, how they think, and how they interact with others.

However, you can’t always immediately stop what you’re doing to go create a scrapbook page when one of your family members says something memorable. What am I saying? You almost never can do that! So what do you do?

You take notes.

There are a bunch of ways you can take notes, depending on your circumstances. A scrap of paper and pencil will work in a pinch. Having a notebook in your purse or stashed around the house for just such moments is handy. Your smart phone is helpful too, since you can jot notes or even dictate them there. I’ve found Facebook and Twitter helpful for capturing moments too, and screen shots of text messages and chats are great as well.

If  you’re not careful, though, those notes will just sit there. If you’re like me at all, you may even forget to date them, so you don’t even remember how old someone was when they made that memorable quote. Try to remember to date them when you jot them down. Don’t be like me!

Do try to turn those quotes into pages though.

ethan in his own words||noexcusescrapbooking.com

You’ll be glad you did.

Aug3

What is a Sketch Master?

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What is a Sketch Master?

Since I released my first book on scrapbooking a year and a half ago, I’ve been planning a whole series of books about scrapbooking. I’ve got about ten different book topics planned that cover scrapbooking everything from vacations to family history.

The one that’s closest to completion is one about how to use sketches. The first draft is done. Now I’m going back through it to try to make sure it clearly says what needs to be said. Once that’s done, I’ll need beta readers. If anyone is interested in being a beta reader, please drop me a line at heather@noexcusescrapbooking.com. I’d love to have the input.

sketches || noexcusescrapbooking.com

The sketch book is going to be called The Scrapbooker’s Guide to Mastering Sketches, and the idea of being a Sketch Master is introduced there.

A Sketch Master is someone who’s able to read and understand sketches (or blueprints, pagemaps, or templates) and turn them into lovely pages of their own. They can adapt and change a sketch to fit their own needs. Additionally, they can take outside inspiration, and turn those things they find into sketches as well. They are even able to create their own sketches from scratch. Finally, they really start to grasp the underlying structure of most well-designed pages, which gives them a real sense of freedom, and they start creating pages without a sketch safety net.

Sound interesting at all? Hopefully it’ll be ready to go next month. Wish me luck!

Jun29

Summer Album Share

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Summer Album Share

Last week, we talked about Amy Tangerine’s Daybooks, and how much fun they are. Want to see one in action? I used one to document our first summer after we moved.

summer cover || noexcusescrapbooking.com summercover detail || noexcusescrapbooking.com

The outside had a fun acetate overlay, and clouds printed on it. I added the labels, and made a sun by cutting two circles out of contrasting colors, laying them on top of each other, and cutting them into wedges. Made it easy to create a quilt-look, and I can make another sun out of the left over pieces! I wonder if I still have the pieces… 😉

page 1 day book || noexcusescrapbooking.com page 2 daybook ||noexcusescrapbooking.com

Before I even started using the interior pages, I decided to add even more to the book, and glued a paper bag onto the front cover. The card for the pocket it made was made of a scrap piece of printed acetate. For any patterned papers that I didn’t particularly like, there were only a handful, I covered up most of them with a piece of paper, a photo, or a journaling card.

page 3 daybook || noexcusescrapbooking.com page 4 daybook ||noexcusescrapbooking.com

Photos didn’t have to fit exactly on a page, but if they extended past the end of a page, I made sure the photo or paper on the back covered the exposed back. I used a lot of washi tape, and scrap paper, as well as a set of die cuts from the same Amy Tangerine line.

page 5 daybook || noexcusescrapbooking.com page 6 daybook || noexcusescrapbooking.com

My creative goal for this album was to have fun, and put together an eclectic and messy, yet still visually approachable book. Most of the photos used started as 4x6s, and were trimmed or cut to fit the space. One of my favorite things to do in the album was to have a photo lay across the gutter.

page 7 daybook || noexcusescrapbooking.com page 8 daybook || noexcusescrapbooking.com

One of the coolest thing about the Amy Tangerine daybook, is the wide variety of paper shapes, colors, and textures. There was even an envelope that made a handy place to store vacation memorabilia.

endpage daybook || noexcusescrapbooking.com

This was so much fun to put together! Hopefully the kids will be willing to pose for some pictures this year. They’re getting old and crotchety. I’m raising little old men!

Looking at this right now, I’m debating on whether I’ll use the daybook I’ve chosen, which is a spiral bound, or switch to one of the sewn ones I have. I really did love being able to bridge the gutter, but I like the idea of a spiral bound better right now. I’ll let you know what I decide.

How are you going to document your summer? If you want to join me with a Daybook summer album, you can find some on Amazon:

Jun15

Summer Want-To-Do List

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Summer Want-To-Do List

One of the reasons I’m looking forward to summer vacation is because I’ll have time to do what I want to do. That doesn’t mean two months of sleeping in and ignoring the kids at dinner time, (seriously they really need to be fed every day?) but rather two months of self-directed productivity.

All my time at home this past year was spent in preparing for class, correcting and grades, and when it got overwhelming, binge reading all sorts of books and binge watching movies and tv. Thank goodness my husband cooks, or the kids would have been eating chicken nuggets and fish sticks half the year.

So what do I want to do this summer?

Well there’s the crafty things like finishing my current Project Life album, and doing a summer fun album, and creating a book of life album about my grandmother.

There’re the writing things, like finishing and publishing my book about using sketches, and finishing my children’s book, and finding the cash to pay an illustrator for another children’s book I’ve finished.

If I’m teaching next year, the jury’s still out on that one, I’ll want to do a tiny bit of prep every day, to make next year much more pleasant.

There are the little trips we’ve got planned this year–visiting an aquarium with my youngest, hiking with my oldest, and spending some quality time with my sister.

Then there are the just plain fun things that could make or break the summer. Things like getting the kids outside more, teaching my youngest to ride his bike, going to the beach, watching lots of movies, reading lots of books, star gazing, and last but not least, hanging with my friends.

That sounds like a pretty good summer to me, how about you?

messy desk|| noexcusescrapbooking.com

This is the current state of my Project Life album, messy desk and all.

 

Jan3

Scrapbooking Reflects Life

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Scrapbooking Reflects Life

Happy New Year everyone! I hope your holiday season was filled with laughter and joy. We were quite busy here; hence the complete lack of posts for December.

Ack! Does that make me a terrible person?

Let me answer that for you: no. Was there really any question?

Any hoo….

I’ve been working on updating my Project Life album. It’s been hard to find the time to do it around the school lesson planning and kid carting and house cleaning and holiday preparations. This past week, once everyone had left, and all the presents were unwrapped, I was able to finally make some progress towards getting this fall’s photos in the album. I’ve got photos in pages, and blank cards in the empty spots, and even managed to add a few bits of memorabilia. I’ll be working on journaling and embellishing next.

Which brings me to my next thought about Project Life, and why it took so long for me to find a way for the project to work for me.

A friend who’s finalizing her Project Life album for 2015 posed a question in a private group: What should she do about a single week where she had no photos, no social media information, nothing to fill in for one week, half a year ago.

Before we get to the real meat of the matter, there are a few quick fixes:

  • Use a general full page photo as a place holder. Things like a seasonal photo or a family photo would be a great thing to fill in that space. You could even add seasonal photos throughout the book to make it seem more intentional, and less random.
  • Look up what was happening in the news that week, and do an overview of that week in history. That could be super interesting to come across when you or your family read your book in the future.
  • Do a year so far summary page. A few photos of things that have changed since the beginning of the year would be fun. I keep thinking it would be interesting to keep a running tab of how many loads of laundry I’ve done, and how many times I’ve turned on the dishwasher, but I always manage to forget after the first week of the year. (Maybe I’ll put up a tally sheet next to each appliance. That could work!)
  • Fudge it. Adjust the previous and following weeks’ photos to fill in the space.
  • Create a piece of art to fill the space. An illustrated quote, photos that have been put through an app like Waterlogue (so much fun!), or a collage of patterned papers could all work as space fillers.

However, that’s not really what I’d recommend doing.

One of the things that initially gave me problems about Project Life was the daily or weekly nature of it. Each two page spread was supposed to cover a specific amount of time. That kind of consistency really doesn’t work for me. I’m more of a batch type of person. When I get involved in something, I like to immerse myself in it completely for awhile, and then take a break and do something else.

This is how I do everything in my life. I’m a serial binger.

Having to take a photo every day is simply not flexible enough for me. Having to sort my stories into specific lengths of time seemed artificial and forced.

It wasn’t until I decided to simply document whatever I managed to photograph or take notes about that Project Life clicked for me.

Project Life, and scrapbooking in general, should reflect your life as it is. Did you not manage to take photos for three weeks? Do you have 215 photos from a single event? It happens. Just don’t let the gap stop you from telling your stories. Don’t let chronology or self-imposed rules or other’s expectations limit how you tell your story.

Your scrapbooks should reflect your life. All of it. Even the parts when you were so busy living you forgot to document them. It’s okay to miss a few moments here and there. That’s what life is like.