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write | american crafts mini journaling ideas

Hello! I am so very excited to be here with you today. I love mini month and I am looking forward to sharing a fun month with you.

This year, we are going to change things up a bit. Each week we will still have a sponsor. Working with the products, we will together brainstorm ideas for creating minialbums with the sponsored products. Then, we will showcase a minialbum or two. Finally, each week will showcase a giveaway of the sponsored products so you, too, can make a mini! Sound good?

 

This week, our kit consists of a selection of papers and embellishments from American Crafts' Dear Lizzy Line.

 

Today is Monday, which means it is our day to chat about journaling. I thought perhaps we could look at the line and see what sort of mini album ideas we can come up with. 

The Serendipity line, includes three journaling card papers. These are a tremendous place to find inspiration. How many ideas do you spy?

Here are a few I came up with.

1. Things I Love Right Now
2. My Favorite Things
3. Bits of Wisdom
4. Things I Love About You
5. Things That Make Me Happy

Did you find any others? Please leave me word and let me know. As an added benefit, all the comments from this week will go toward a giveaway--so leave many this week!

Hi, Everyone! Passover is now just a few days away, which means I have not had much time for  scrapbooking lately. Not scrapbooking always makes me a little antsy and agitated. But, when I can't scrapbook, I still try to collect some stories and inspiration so that I am ready to go as soon as I get the chance.

Since my older son is a junior in high school, every holiday, every routine, every tradition feels like "it's almost the last time." That right there is a story waiting for a page. 

The other story I am gearing up to tell, is how every year, right before Passover, my husband takes the boys to visit Coney Island on the opening day of its amusement park. I stay home and clean. (Lucky me!) I've been looking through old photos from over the years, and my oh my, this tugs on the heart a bit. Because somehow this,

and this,

has turned to this:

If you are low on time for scrapbooking, keep collecting those stories, because time is moving fast. Very fast indeed.

Write: Start with a Story

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!

Write: Interviews

Hello! It's Jennifer Larson with a favorite journaling technique: interviewing.

I get tired of trying to remember all the details when I am scrapbooking. When I scrapbook other people especially, I like to ask them to construct the page verbally, so that's what I did with this page about my younger son. I tend to use the Currents list with myself a lot just to keep track of what I'm into at a particular moment. (If you are unfamiliar with the Currents list, google "Currents Scrapbooking.") I've started doing that with my eldest on his birthday, and I decided recently to use the currents with my youngest to interview him. Here's the page:

Here I paired the list with his journaled list of what he's into right now. I typed his list, then spaced it about 2.0, then trimmed it out and stamped the category of Current. 

Here's a note about stamping: If you don't try to do it neatly, it will look like you did it cooler on purpose. Do that. I also tend to sew down journaling strips on one side just to keep it solid. 

Thank you for visiting! I hope you now go and interview others if you haven't done so yet, if not with currents, then to supplement details with whatever you are scrapbooking.

Hi everyone! Happy President's Day to all you US readers out there! A couple of weeks ago, Ali Edwards posted a link to this article on Facebook. Now, as scrapbookers, we are pretty well versed in the idea of capturing the ordinary, everyday moments. It's kind of our Raison D'etre. Still, this article hit home. Perhaps because as the parent of a high school junior, the time when my older son will move away is a little too close for comfort. So when the author suggested recording not just your child's first words, but also conversations that you have along the way, I thought, "Yes. I will get right on that."

We recently had our older son home alone one evening, and it was a good time to have some meaty conversations about the future. What I love is that anything we talked about here may very well change over the next several years, but now we can remember what he was thinking about at this point in time.

 

Whether you have big guys or little guys, take a little time to write down some things they do and say. Because they probably won't do them forever.

Sniff. 

Write: What I loathe

Hello! It's Jennifer Larson with a brief confession: I hate Valentine's Day. Perhaps as a result of that, I hate February. Everything in February is love love love. Mine you, I love my husband, but I love to scrap more this month than what I love, so February tends to make me a little mulish and I want to scrap anything but love.

On that note, I invite you to be a little mulish yourself and make a list of what you loathe in this month that celebrates love and adulation. Truth be told, I'm a fairly agreeable person, but every now and then somethings gets me. I find it satisfying to get it out there on a page and complain about it. Here's my list:

1. Deer in my garden
2. Temps in the teens below zero
3. Kittens who want to be fed at 4 A.M.
4. Not enough time to run after work
5. Spiders
6. Shopping for jeans
7. Sherlock taking years to release new episodes
8. Anything Kardashian, except the Twitter site Kim Kierkegaardashian

When I scrap this page, I think I'll put it on a page with a photo of myself making a sour face. I like that idea.

I hope this gives you ideas to wallow in loathing in this month of love! LOL

write | snapshot snippets

Hello! This is our last week with our topic of Decades, so I put on my thinking cap and thought about some ways I could journal about decades. And I decided to do a photoless layout (as I have very few photos from my childhood) that made lists of snippets of my life at 10, 20, and 30. It was fun to think back and to remember things that were important to me at those times. 

I did take longer than scheduled to complete this layout, as I found myself googling old friends to see where they are now. (Which of course led down the abyss of internet time waste. Goodness. I am so pressed for time. Why do I let this happen??)

Here it is. I like it. And it was way fun. Hope you will try one, too!

 

Happy Monday!

Write: Layers of Memory

Yesterday at church I heard one of my friends griping about how much she hates January. “It’s cold and dreary and smoggy,” she was saying, “and you can’t do anything outside. You’re just stuck in your house.”

Which really is precisely the reason I sort of love January. It’s cold and dreary and smoggy, and no one expects you to get anything really productive done. What’s not to love about a month of staying home and getting other stuff done?

I tend to finish a ton of scrapbook layouts in January! And most of them are Christmas layouts, because I’m not one of those Super Scrapbookers who manages beautiful Christmases and December-Daily-style albums. All of which is to say: I hope you’ll bear with me while I share a Christmas layout:

 

It’s really just a standard Christmas layout: some red and green, some glittery embellishments (although, I confess, I love silvery glittery embellishments quite a bit). What I love about it—what I want to share—is the idea I had for the journaling.

While working on Christmas layouts, I’ve been thinking about how memory and holidays are so closely intertwined. You remember your kids when they were smaller, and you also remember yourself when you were young and experiencing that holiday. That idea infuses the stories I told on this layout. I wrote about how we used to always spend time with each of my grandmothers on Christmas, with lots of details about what happened there. Then I segued into my son’s experiences at his grandparents’ houses during Christmas. I included the addresses of all my grandparents in the story…I had to call my mom and my sister to figure them all out, but those conversations were full of details that sparked other layouts, too. (I wished, after I’d printed the journaling, that I’d also included my kids’ grandparents’ addresses, so I just wrote them in a note on the back of the layout.)

So here’s a little journaling challenge for you. When you are writing your stories, sometimes try to think backwards—remember something from  your childhood, or from when your child was younger, and connect it to the event (it doesn’t have to be a holiday) you’re writing about. Writing like this creates interesting, layered stories. It’s also an approach you can take when you’re stumped on what else you might write about.

Write: This was the year...

Hello! It's Jennifer Larson, sharing an idea for a page I did last year that I will probably do every year, a page that starts with journaling.

 

The purpose of the page is to assemble the highlights of the year in one page, starting with the prompt, "This was the year that..." What kind of things can you include? Anything that jumps out at you. Here's some ideas:

1. Accomplishments
2. Something new
3. A loss
4. Something about a hobby
5. Something you finally did
6. Something you enjoyed
7. Places
8. Something challenging
9. Milestones
10. Something that ended

I make the list to include the whole family. It's my point of view of what was significant to your year, but you could certainly involve your family and friends. I think that would be fun!

 

Here's the page I made for 2013:

I used leftover, unscrapped photos that represented the journaling. In other words, I tried not to print anything new.

And some details from the page:

 

 

I haven't yet made my page for 2014, but here's my list:

1. We crossed the Mississippi Headwaters.
2. We packed out to camp at Lake Maria State Park.
3. I became technologically superior to my husband with my iPad Air for work and my iPhone 6.
4. Derick celebrated his 50th at Holland, Michigan.
5. We survived the Polar Vortex and the June floods.
6. I began running again.
7. The boys took up acting.
8. Dominic joined orchestra.
9. The boys started their final year of elementary school.
10. We lost our beloved Agatha but gained our kitten Pepper.
11. Derick traveled to London for work.

I might add another thing to the list just because the oddness of 11. I'm just that way.

Thank you for reading about my suggestions for jouraling your year-in-review! I hope you enjoy it and that it gives you ideas.

Write: Journaling Ideas from Embellishments

Hello, and welcome to today’s Write post. If you’re anything like me (Amy Sorensen), you’re feeling a little bit frantically busy, preparing for Christmas. I have a billion things to do today, but I wanted to share a quick journaling tip first, before I shop, bake, make candy, pick my daughter up from the airport, and go to a family party.

When you find yourself lost for words, or unsure about the story you want to tell, try using the words from an embellishment, card, or patterned paper as a starting point.

Take this photo:

 

It’s from Christmas Eve 2004 (I’ve been trying to scrap all of my 2004 images this month), and I love it so much. Quite a bit has changed in our world since then, but when I look at the photo what I remember most is how it felt to have a whole passel of Santa-Claus believers.

It was a pretty sweet night.

But I didn’t quite know how to frame my words—how to start saying what I wanted to say. So I flipped through some supplies, and a Maggie Holmes sticker caught my eye. It so closely matched what I was trying to say but couldn’t quite, yet, that I pulled it out of my pile, thought for a few minutes, and then I wrote my journaling. The words flew out of my fingers once I had that spark!

Here is the layout I made. The sticker that inspired me is the one that says "my heart is full," and it was inspiring because a full heart is exactly what this photo made me feel.

(I wish the sparkly snowflakes and title could be properly conveyed in a photograph!)

So! If you happen to find yourself with a little bit of scrapping time in between last-minute shopping and all that wrapping, turn to your embellishments for a journaling idea. See where it takes you!

Happy holidays!