Category Archives: how to scrapbook

Pocket Pages to the Rescue!

Pocket Pages to the Rescue!

Earlier this week, you saw the picture-less spread about my trip to Jamaica, and read the whole long story about why I didn’t have any pictures.

Jamaica--no photos || noexcusescrapbooking.com

But then, I found them. And printed them. And used them.

pocket pages to expand a story || noexcusescrapbooking.com

A picture on the back of the wedding invite and cardstock insert added the most important details first, and pocket pages filled with some shots of the people and places involved rounded out the details. An enlargement of my favorite photo with some fun papers satisfied my need to make something pretty, while adding a nice final touch to the story.

pocket pages to expand a story pt 2 || noexcusescrapbooking.com

 

Putting together these pages, I was totally inspired by the pocket page classes I took through True Scrap in January. Monica McNeill’s class on batch processing, and keeping it simple helped me focus on what I wanted the end result to be: story and picture driven. Lilith Eeckels’ class gave me the additional permission I needed as well as inspiration to add a full scrapbook page in with the pocket page story. If you haven’t checked out those classes, you totally should, especially since they are only on sale till the end of the month. ($9 a piece instead of over $12! And, if you decide to buy all 6 pocket page classes, you can get them for $7.50 each. Just use coupon code SAVE40 at checkout.)

The best part? I don’t have to do anything else to tell this story. It’s done. I suppose I can use some of these pics to help tell other stories, but this story is DONE! And that feels good. 🙂

Have you ever lost any of your photos? What have you done to tell your story without them?

Blast from the Past: Scrapbooking without photos. And a few tangents along the way.

Blast from the Past: Scrapbooking without photos. And a few tangents along the way.

The kids are on spring break and we’re off to visit relatives this week. Here’s an old post for you from 2010. A very LONG post. So grab your favorite cuppa, and enjoy! 

I thought today might be a good day to walk you through the process of creating a scrapbook page with no pictures. “What?” you say, “How can you scrapbook without pictures? Isn’t the whole point to USE YOUR PICTURES? Your family treasures?”
Well yes, using pictures is fun, and while it makes you feel like you are making progress, it’s really a false sense of progress, unless you include the MOST IMPORTANT THING: Your words.
I have looked through a scrapbook that my grandparents had from when they first got married. There are a few captions here and there, so I’m not completely in the dark, but for the most part I have no idea who all these people were, and why they were important to my grandparents.
Isn’t that sad?
I want to know more about my grandparents’ experiences as kids growing up, as high school students during the great depression, as young marrieds at the start of World War II. I want to know more about their life together raising three kids, and the careers they had, and their take on life. And while I knew them fairly well, and even lived with them occasionally, there’s still so much I don’t know that I wish I did.
And that is why I scrapbook.
Because even though someone else may get to know me very well, they still can’t tell my story the way I am experiencing it. And if my children are anything like me, they will want to know my story, too. And this is why I’m trying to get my mother to write a little about her story, because even though she’s still around, and I can ask her any question I can think of, it still won’t be HER story without her perspective.

Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now. But I love scrapbooking. Because it’s ALL about love.

Another slight tangent regarding why I don’t have any photos from the trip I and my husband took to Jamaica. While happily snapping away during the dinner after our friend’s wedding ceremony, my camera froze up. The lens cover would no longer open and close, and it would no longer turn on. When a change of batteries did not solve the issue, I concluded that I probably got sand into the camera housing. Getting it cleaned and repaired would cost more than a new point and shoot, so that’s what we decided to do. Eventually. On Mother’s Day of the following year. So I went without a camera from November to May. I do have some video of Ethan on Christmas thanks to the video camera Ross had given me the previous year, but not much in the way of daily life snapshots.
I took the memory card from the camera to a local photo shop and had the pics put on disk, but didn’t print any because I wanted to decide what to print and what to toss first. I remember seeing the pics once, but have not been able to access the disk since. I’ve got one more trick to try at home before I go back to the local shop and ask, beg and plead for help with my now 4 and a half year old disk.

Anyway. No pictures. But I do have memorabilia. The wedding invitation. The ticket stub for the plane. A business card from the resort we stayed at. A postcard that I sent to Ethan while we were there. (I missed my boy-o a lot, but really relished the child free mornings and evenings.)

How it all began:

Stacy Julian put up a prompt on her website for a color combination she called “spring surf.”  The colors reminded me of the whole Jamaica experience, so I decided I’d do a page about that. I printed out a screen shot of her color inspiration, and pulled out papers that were close to what she had listed, pulled out my memorabilia box, and threw all the pieces together on my work table so they could live together and learn how to get along. In between trips to my MIL’s house to paint the hall, I shuffled papers and memorabilia around, and gradually weeded out the parts that didn’t work. I decided to use 5X7 page protectors on one side, so I could have a place for one of the invites and the postcard, and additional journaling, if I want to get into how much I needed a vacation at that point in time. Oh, and to add the weird stories, like the glass bottom boat operator who exposed himself while I was recovering from a bit of claustrophobia after snorkeling, and the walk up the beach to a Jimmy Buffett themed resort to watch football with the guys.

Any way, those stories may or may not get recorded, but I have a place for them if I feel the need to add them. I finally figured out that I wanted just the highlights of the trip as part of the page, so printed them out with word. Using the color scheme, I added bits of patterned paper and cardstock to the small spaces of the 5X7 page protector, and added a strip of lace paper on top of the Jamaica/Caribbean patterned paper I’ve been saving for 5 years. I placed it over the red part of the collage to tone it down, and used that as the base line to build out the other parts of the page: the invitation, the ticket stub, the journaling, and the business card. I used an old rub-on and some letter stickers to add a title. I probably should have used larger letters for the Jamaican part of the title to make them easier to read, but I’m okay with imperfection. I’ve got more important things to do than get every scrapbook page exactly right. I added a piece of raffia to the postcard to make it easier to pull out and read. I chose raffia because it echoes the natual fibers Kate used on her wedding invitation, and the thatched roofs of a lot of Jamaican buildings.

If the local photo shop is able to save any of my photos, I’ll add them to a divided page protector, and call it done. The trip was a wonderful diversion, and I don’t feel the need to spend much more time on it than slipping a few photos into a few pockets. I would like a picture of me pregnant with Simon, though, which is why I’m still trying to get the photos.

Jamaica--no photos || noexcusescrapbooking.com

 

Since I originally posted this in 2010, I have found the fabled lost photos, and begun to scrap them. I’ll update you with the rest of the Jamaica pages later this week!

The Benefits of Dabbling

The Benefits of Dabbling

You may not have realized this yet, but I’m a big fan of ignoring the “rules” of scrapbooking. One of the hardest rules for new scrapbookers, and even well-seasoned scrapbookers, to learn to ignore is the idea that scrapbooking needs to be chronological.

Unfinished Project Life

Don’t believe me? You’ve heard of Becky Higgin’s Project Life by now, right? In part it was created when she felt overwhelmed trying to keep up with chronological traditional scrapbooking. She wanted a simpler way to document her life in a chronological way, and Project Life was born. (You can find it in her own words in her product catalog here.)

Yep. There’s the trap right there. Thinking that you have to scrap in order and that there’s a phase of scrapbooking where you’re “caught up.” You know what caught up means to me? Done. I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever want to be done with scrapbooking. There are always more stories to tell. Running out of stories to tell? Can’t imagine how that will ever happen. And you know what? That’s okay. More than okay, it’s wonderful!

Fifth Grade filler pagesBecause I am completely against the idea of making scrapbooking feel like a chore, I do not, nor have I ever, scrapbooked only in chronological order. That is not to say I do not have any scrapbook albums that are chronological. I’ve got my kids’ first year of life in mini albums, as well as their school of life albums. (Those are actually all “caught up.” LOL) I’ve got travel albums, where it makes sense to document the trip in a  day by day manner. I’ve got week in the life albums, where I try to capture daily life in detail for a week.

In short, I do some chronology. Key word there? Some. The rest of what gets done? Completely random. Pages about college are done right after pages about marriage, and right before pages about the latest weird/silly/funny thing one of my kids has done.

LOAD12 || wordsearch page noexcusescrapbooking.com
The result? My albums are eclectic. And possibly even chaotic. (I’m a fan of random.) And they cover bits of my life and my family’s lives. They are not complete, but that’s okay. Once again, I don’t ever want to be finished with scrapbooking.

And the benefit is that I always have stories to tell. I tell stories based on what is inspiring me, and motivating me at any given moment. I’m never thinking that I have to finish one particular (uninspiring) story before starting another (interesting) one. There’s no guilt, no must-dos, and no RULES! As a result, lots of stories get told. And that’s good enough for me.

Do you have any rules that get in the way of you actually creating pages? What are they? Are you really going to let them stop you from doing something fun?

Finding the Time

Finding the Time

One of the biggest complaints/excuses out there about why people choose not to scrapbook is that they just don’t have the time.

There’s this perception that scrapbooking and memory keeping in general takes this huge amount of time out of your day. I’ve never found that to be the case, but that may be due to the way I approach the whole concept.

Making a scrapbook page doesn’t mean you have to have all your photos printed and organized first, nor do you have to make your page extremely artistic or even tightly designed.

Nor do you have to do ten pages about one event, or even tell the story in chronological order.

Scrapbooking is so much simpler than that.

It is one story, and a piece of paper to write it on, plus a picture or two or three to illustrate your story. That’s it. Everything else is bells and whistles.

You don’t even need paper. A status update on Facebook, like this one I put up yesterday is totally scrapbooking. It’s just a digital version.

FB status grab

Now, I’m not recommending that you never put anything on paper. In fact, at the rate in which technology changes and gets damaged, having only digital records would be a recipe for lots of lost memories.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. Especially if you use it as a temporary warehouse for memories, for when you have five minutes to document your story in a more lasting manner.

So that’s one way for you to capture memories quickly and easily. You’re even probably already doing that.

How about a couple other quick ways to document your life before we finish for today?

Next up? An old school organizing tool–your calendar or agenda. Yep. That pile of paper hanging on your wall or tucked into your purse. That is a great, quick scrapbooking tool.

Simply write down memorable things someone said or did in the relevant square, and you’ve done some scrapbooking. Really! It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Last up– journaling cards that are designed for pocket pages. This is the latest trend that has been sweeping the scrapbooking world– it’s been going on for a few years now, and shows every sign of expanding and really and truly altering the way people save their memories.

It’s a simple concept–write a few notes about a day or an event, and pair it with a few photos, and you’re done. You can add artistic elements if you so desire, but the important thing is saving those memories.Using pocket pages to document life || noexcusescrapbooking.com

The cards are about the same size as a playing card, so are really easy to slip into a pocket or purse to have handy when you just have to capture the latest goofy thing you heard. (Around here, we concentrate on goofy and silly, in case you were wondering.)

That’s all you really need to start scrapbooking. Really.

A memory, and a place to store it. It doesn’t matter if it’s digital, or paper, it’s still a memory worth saving, and it doesn’t take very much time at all. You can definitely squeeze it into your busy schedule.

You were going to post that adorable cat/kid/spouse photo anyway, weren’t you?

LOAD’s Not Over Yet!

LOAD’s Not Over Yet!

Yesterday was pretty productive. I did a little writing for a class I’m working on for you, and I made these three pages during Lain Ehmann’s monthly Scrapbook Improv. ( I followed the prompts and everything!)

first impression || noexcusescrapbooking.com

My scrap bin got a serious workout, but it still looks as full as when I started the month. Maybe I should do a grab bag of scraps as a giveaway. Anyone interested?

crafty vacay || noexcusescrapbooking.com

Some of the coolest things in the scrap bin are the partially finished collage pieces. Painted book leaf? I’ve got that. Misted stencil– that’s in there too. Well not anymore. Now they’re on a page. Woo hoo!

hams || noexcusescrapbooking.com

 

And I knew that Lego paper was going to come in handy. After all I do have a couple Lego fiends in the house. It’s only a couple years old…

So did you set any scrappy goals for yourself this month? How did you do? If I get two more pages done, I’ll have done a 3/4 LOAD. That works for me!