Journal Your Way through Your Teen’s Years

Next week my children return to school. It is hard to believe that my youngest is entering his first year of middle school, my middle child is entering her last year of middle school and my oldest child has just two years of school left. I am grateful that so far my children have faired well. We haven’t experienced many problems along the way. As each year passes without major incidences I feel like I can breathe a sigh of relief. Yet at the same time, as each new school year approaches I can’t help but worry some. Middle school … Continue reading

Pre-Writing

I’ve started throwing away what I write. Really. I’ve started writing and writing and writing and then deleting what I’ve written or just opening another blank document and starting again. I might write about the same thing or I might write about something completely new. I might write about nothing or I might be inspired by a particular quote. There are various methods of writing but I’ve settled on this one. I’ve never been one for highly structured outlines prior to writing my papers. My brain simply doesn’t think like that. I don’t think in “beginning, middle, end” linearity or … Continue reading

Creating a Journal Scrapbook

A journal scrapbook is similar to a regular one in that it captures memories but it is filled with more words than pictures. It serves almost as if it’s a diary. I started putting one together a few years ago and laid it aside but I plan on picking it back up again. I happened to save enough memorabilia over the years, going back into my childhood days that I can put together a pretty nice journal scrapbook. One of the pages of my journal scrapbook holds a dog biscuit. Now that might sound strange but let me explain why. … Continue reading

Blogging Your Health: Pros and Cons

The other day, I was thinking long and hard about blogging your health: what to say, how much detail to give, who gets to read your posts. It’s a tricky issue, to say the least. Let’s look at some positives and negatives. The advantages of blogging your health can include: Ease. Make one post/update to your social networking site of choice and all your friends get the news at the same time. It’s quick and easy — and that’s good at a time when you may not have a lot of time and energy to devote to keeping everybody updated. … Continue reading

5 Quick and Fast Journaling Tips

Many scrapbookers feel that journaling is daunting task that is usually put off until last. Some scrapbookers don’t even include journaling on their pages, because it takes too much time and effort. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. There are a few ways to make it a bit more fast and easy, than simply writing all the time. Blogs – If you have a blog, and you update it at all, you might be able to use entire posts for your scrapbook. You could simply cut, paste and print it, finally placing it on the layout at the … Continue reading

Capturing Quirky Habits and Mannerisms

This is the final article in a six part series about capturing the complete personalities and uniqueness of the individuals who adorn our scrapbook pages. This article focuses on capturing each individual’s quirky habits and their individual mannerisms that make up who they are. Please keep in mind that not only does this work on your children, but also on you, your significant other and friends and family members. We are all full of traits that make us who we are. Sometimes we actually can get a photograph of someone that captures a trait or two, but there are things … Continue reading

Capturing a Little Personality

This is the fifth part of a six part series that delves into capturing the complete personalities and uniqueness of the individuals who adorn our scrapbook pages. This article focuses on capturing each individual’s true personality without sugar coating it. Please keep in mind that not only does this work on your children, but also on you, your significant other and friends and family members. Let’s face it, we all have unique personalities. And in that aspect, sometimes personalities can clash, even within a close-knit family. Some people are even-tempered, happy go lucky people while others might be stubborn or … Continue reading

More Fantastic Font Finds For Your Scrapbooking

Journaling is something that is often put off until the layout is finished in every other way. If you do this too, you are certainly not alone. In a recent poll, 78% of scrapbookers voted that they wait until the end to do their journaling. I find it difficult to do it at the beginning, though there have been times that I have. Since I happen to put off journaling until the end, I have a lot of layouts that are sitting in limbo waiting for that final journaling block. I decided recently to play ‘catch up’ and get that … Continue reading

Scrapbooking Layouts with No Journaling

Creating layouts with your photographs is definitely the point of scrapbooking. Having a scrapbook page or layout with no journaling goes against everything I teach, but sometimes it happens and sometimes a photograph speaks for itself. So how do you go about telling a story with only a photograph, and no journaling? To begin with, think outside the normal scrapbooking box. Get creative with your layout, choose embellishments that might help to tell a story. For instance, a close up of your four year old in Hawaii could be enlarged and placed on a page all on its own. Use … Continue reading

Wreck This Journal – Keri Smith

There’s nothing quite like a beautiful journal. They beckon, but they can also intimidate. Sometimes what you want to write or doodle doesn’t seem quite important or beautiful enough to go on those gorgeous handmade paper pages. Creativity is sometimes messy though. And to have the freedom to be creative, sometimes you need to write or draw things that aren’t perfect or pretty. And that’s why I like the Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith. It’s a paper back journal with sturdy pages. The pages are printed with directions. Some of the directions are silly. One page wants you to … Continue reading