The strangest thing happened to me during January and February: I found myself in a scrapbooking slump. Likely this was caused by a variety of things—drought anxiety and worrying over teenagers and my mysteriously unhappy hamstrings and taking care of my mom, who had her spine fused. It was a long a dreary (but, alas, dry) winter for me, and it left me feeling sort of blah about everything—even scrapbooking!
Strange because usually scrapbooking pulls me right out of my doldrums.
This time it took spring. Daffodils and blue skies and a couple of rain storms. At any rate, I was ready to scrapbook again a couple of weeks ago. Except, I sort of didn’t know where to start. That weekend, I was listening to my kids tell stories to each other—my daughter was home from college, and they were all hanging out together, laughing and talking and teasing. “Remember that time,” Haley laughed, “when Kaleb hit Jake in the head with a rock at the beach?”
Five years later, that’s finally a funny (instead of painful) memory. And a story I hadn’t told! Which made me remember: my favorite way to start a scrapbook layout is with a story. And since I hadn’t scrapped that story yet, I went ahead and (finally!) made a layout:
Simple and colorful and straightforward; heavy on the words. Totally my style of layout. I didn’t take a photo of Jake’s injury. In fact, I didn’t even have a very good photo of him that day at the beach. So I used a scenery photo and told the story, and somewhere in between writing the story and gluing down those letters, I found my scrapping mojo again!
So here’s a little journaling challenge for you. Think of a story you’ve never told on a scrapbook layout—and then tell it. If you don’t have a picture of the people involved, find some other image that relates somehow to the story. And just enjoy the process of writing it!
