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Journaling & The Around Here Layout

That's great to hear from sally in her own words, I thought that was awesome. So thank you big thank you to hallie, and we will be using her stamp one of her stamp sets and on this next layout. But, you know, she's talking a lot about telling your story and journaling and I think that's so important, but it can be kind of intimidating for some people if you're not a natural writer, if you're not comfortable writing paragraphs and paragraphs of deep thoughts, sometimes that can seem a little overwhelming. You know, for me, I'm not a big fan of writing. I've never been some it's never been something I've really enjoyed, so I kind of have worked around it and found other strategies that that works better for me and how I liketo cover things so one of the ideas would be to write to the subject of your layout. So, denise, you kind of asked about that on dh how you how you address the writing in your on your pages to you say you did this or he did this, how do you cover that? And I think it'...

s more natural for me if I feel like I'm writing to the child. I kind of consider a lot of my scrapbook pages like little mini love letters to my kids, you know, where I can write a few things to them that maybe I wouldn't just say every day, but they can kind of go back and we'll have that in their scrapbooks. So right to your child, you know, right what you're feeling, what you're thinking beyond just what's going on. I love how he talked about getting your your ideas and your feelings down because that will be something that's ah, worth well for you to read later on and also for your child, ali also touched on this point is to try bullet points or a numbered list. You don't have to write in long paragraphs and and feel like you're doing an faa for school or something, you know, just it's short little bullet points or sometimes great a numbered list like we did on the last layout is a nice way to do it or I put this layout up there because it shows I did a an alphabet list. So for each letter of the alphabet, I just came up with a word, a descriptive word that describes what my son was like right then at that age, so I had to force myself to eat a little creative to think of some of those words for some of the letters but it's a good way to get a lot of information on a page I mean it covers a lot about his personality what toys he liked, what he liked to eat but it wasn't like intensive for me to write all that out into paragraphs um I talked about the envelopes for him and journaling again that's something that's great if you feel like you don't want all of that out there for the world to see even you know, casual people looking through your scrapbooks you might not want them to be able to just read every thought that you've written down so you know, one one way to do it is to place your journaling inside of an envelope like that you can slide a tag behind a photograph I'm even I've even sometimes flip the page over if it's like solid car stock and you can write on the back you know of the page and and again, you know that it's in there but the whole world doesn't need to know or you could even do like a like a folded car take a piece of card stock folded like a card and then put your photograph on top so then it opens up and then you can have a whole bunch of writing space inside so that's another way toe hydro journaling so you can feel more comfortable kind of putting it all out there a lot of times I just let a quote do the work for me, so if I have a picture that I love or just a moment that I want to capture, but maybe it doesn't need a whole bunch of journaling, sometimes I'll just use a quote because sometimes someone else has said it much better than I didn't say it and again, since I think about my pages, there's little love letters to my kids or little ways for me to impart awesome wisdom to them. Sometimes the quotes a great way to just capture a feeling or capture some advice that you want to give to your child, and I'll just put the quote right on their with their photographs and sometimes that's all I include put the author of the quote in there sometimes cut that off, I usually put the out the offer the quote, make sure to put that in there, too. Sometimes they're saying that maybe don't have a specific author, you know, but I do try to include that as well, and then finally to let prompts a product guide you, we're going like I like I said, we're going to be using alley stamps and those air prompts, but I found that's a great way to just get the ideas brewing in your head gets some brainstorming down answer the simple prompts and again, it's not intimating that you have to write out a whole paragraph, you're just kind of answering some brief little questions sometimes the product will have things on there that can can be prompts for example, remember that paper that was in the kit that had the who? What, when, where? Why on the back that would have been a fun way to just, you know, answer some questions there I've had untold scrapbooking paper that had been one of my kidsbooks it was all about birthdays I think was like chatterbox member, that company from long ago, and they had, you know, my favorite birthday gift, wass here's who came to my party and it was just prompts little stickers and you could stick them on your page and then answer the questions. So sometimes the product can guide what you're going to say, and it can kind of make the whole process a little bit less intimidating. Ok? Anybody struggle with writing or feel intimidated by writing on your pages? There's everybody else comfortable with it in my nearly one eye every time I just like, I don't know what to say and I and I feel like every time I write something it looks hideous too, so I start going with like making it look pretty and not saying too much and not saying too little so and sometimes it's hard when you're physically writing it on the page you're worried about my gonna mess this paper up and I only have one copy of it because anyone write it out first and then transcribe it on do you caddy that help you it does help me do you kind of edit yourself everyone my husband too just to make sure because I I've actually you know messed up on things I'm like oh no sticker yeah I found it very helpful to do it that way and I also like journaling on the computer so I can do it in my word processing program and I like that because it's maybe a little bit neater than my handwriting and I can also usually fit more in a smaller space and I could if I was handwriting it so if I have just a small little bit of room for my journaling off sometimes do it on the printer and it's printed out so anyways we are ready to go into our next layout you guys ready to get back into the paper in the glue on the pictures okay so this layout is just based on those prompts that's the stamp set from alley this was the first month of her subscription stamper story stamps so this one this particular set is not available anymore on her website but I still wanted to use it because I think it's great for baby pages each month she has a different stamp set that comes out with her subscriptions so you can always check her site and see what's coming up next but this one's great because it has just different prompts around here that was the one she was talking about today you this is this is kind of a cool one to me because long ago when I was first getting in the scrap looking after my boys were born I actually went to a class that she taught on creating a whole little mini album using just this prompt it was called today you with the class and we did a whole album where every page which is the collection of photos and it would say today you and you just wrote some random things about the photos and then go to the next page in a new set of photos today you and you just fill them in and so I pulled that out in preparation for this class and it was really fun to look back is again there were little stories and little moments that I probably would not have remembered if I hadn't just randomly jotted down some facts there okay, so we're going to use this blue this pretty blue color this blue green aqua color as our background for the page so you can pull that out and really any photograph will work for this layout I'm using a vertical four by six just of my little guy running away and his one z with a little baby chubby baby legs there to love, and we're also going to me in the paper, this one that's called free verse. It has this lined paper look on one side and on the back is just, um, greg grid and what I wanted to show you with how we talked about liking both sides of the paper and caddy was worried about using up the side that she really liked and not being able to use it. This is kind of a little trick that you can use where you can get more mileage out of your kits and more mileage out of your paper by using both sides, but covering the cuts seem with ah, little terrace trip wrote one of those branding strip, so the first thing we're going to do is cut off an inch and cut it from this side because I think I like this. Look over here, we don't cut that off, you may want to cut off the manufacturer, strip first, and then just cut an inch off this side of the paper, and then you can take this whole thing and turn it the other way because we're going to cut three inches off the bottom, actually, it will cut more the stuff, um and while you have your paper term around, you can cut off the terrace trip from this one. This was called broad though if you remember this paper we used it in the other on the other layout we just want this polka dot branding strip you can see how useful these old strips are used for also things, and then I really liked the strip on the bottom of this prismatic paper the one that's black on one side and white on the other it has kind of like a coral colored strip along the bottom and I'm going to cut that out as well cut that off, I should say, and then finally one more strip it's off of the mile marker page that we used on the very first layout member, the one with the numbers kind of in the map design, you can cut off that branding strip, okay? Actually, before we hear it, I think I'm gonna do are stamping first. Um, so we're just going to stamp on one liars of stamping on both of those what I'm going to do it's kind of use an assortment of these I have around here, I'm going to use that one going to reuse the remember stamp something step that I'm gonna put it on the flip side of my block and then I mean he's currently, but I'll do that do that a minute we're using to stamp today these color theory inks from studio calico. They're dying, so they have a whole rainbow of colors available, and I'm really like how they work also like how you can stamp one time with them and get a nice, vibrant color. And then if you stamp again without reinking, you get a nice, almost completely different color that's a little bit of a lighter color, so that's a fun think about the stamps as well. So let's, take the coral. This is called coral bay, and so I want to just stamp kind of like halfway across my page here, and I'm going to start at the third line down. I found that that worked best, and I want to stand and then leave a little bit of space stamp again, and I'm not going to line them all up perfectly. I'm going to kind of stagger them a little bit, so I'm just gonna leave about like an inch in between and then my journaling will fill in that space. It's interesting what people been saying about the journaling in the chat rooms and nicole kerry is saying, actually for me, it's the opposite problem, I struggle with finding photos to go with my writing and emotions at the time I'm making the layout, see what a different perspective just goes to show we all have like different things that we're good at and not you know that we struggle with and because she says she comes from our journaling background so therefore making pretty things the photos came after her with journaling first ok, so and this one says currently so I'm gonna switch it out and use this stamp again I'm just kind of randomly putting them down the page there do we want to pass this around for you stamped already everybody got what would you like one now the stamps reusable nicole oh yes you can use them again and again I think you need to wash off being called just rub it off or is it just trying it's okay if you're really good about it, you probably watched them if you're like me sometimes you watch them off and sometimes you don't like that some interesting new colors yeah yeah usually you know once you stand with and it kind of rubs off but yeah, technically you should watch them off but that's what's wonderful about stamps versus buying stickers or other products like that is that you can reason again can change the color each time with your thanks so that's nice ok, since we have the stamping done, we're going to add here this down to the background and I'm just leaving like a half inch border all the way around you can see I stamp too many times so I'm just gonna cover that up it's okay um and so this is a great way to use two sides of one pattern or one piece of paper if you like both patterns you can cut off the bottom three inches of it and then flip it over and then if you don't, you know you have to use a background piece of card stock is your base but that's ok? And then you can use a little strip or some washi tape or anything like that to kind of cover up the scene and then it just looks like a flows together nicely when you take that smaller scream and do the three three by eleven strip this time on the grace grace side up I like to use pattern paper as my background page a lot. You know, there's many people who feel like they have to use cards talk all the time but you can use pattern paper is your background as long as it's not too busy into crazy can do that? So they use this coral striped diagonal stripes trip to kind of cover up that seem and then you can't take her photograph and hear that kind of to the right to the left of their line of prompts that we've stand and then we have these two other strips that I asked you to cut out they're both going to kind of book into the photograph so you can decide if you want to use the poke it out down here up here I'm going to use the polka dot down here and I'm just going to cut it so that it kind of spans this gap between the picture and the edge of the journaling so you can kind of I have all that figure out where you want to cut it there's no exact measurement like how this kind of like frames the focal point of the page which is your words and your picture now this page in the colors of this page are quite different from that be happy lay out that we did so you can see how even in the same kit your pages can look completely different the colors are different and the whole feel of them can be very different that's what's great about those kids and then I'm gonna take this other diagonal strip and I'm just going to cut it to be the same with this the photo which is four inches and again you can just eyeball it what's everybody doing having fun good have you tried these color theory inks before? Never never is anyone of big stamper I'm are you you stand into a last campaign I do like only a moderate amount myself but I think every month of the kid subscription I always add on the extra stand except the adams yeah, I love them they are really versus what you could get a lot of use out of them okay um and then to finish off this page we're just going to look through this stamp booklet and you just want an assortment of any of the square stamps yeah postage stamps I'm gonna get postage stamps and the the critic stamps these air the little booklet of the postage stamps so just pick out I don't know let's see how many I used maybe like eight, eight or nine they're going to use on our page do the, um being colors coordinate with anything like is their cards talk that they go with or there are there are embellishments and things that are in that same kind of colin color palette and they kind of released new colors of ink every so often so there's a there's a wide variety of colors available and like I said if you if you do the second generation stamping which is when you stamp so I'll say example here you need to get that little block back thank you and this is what's kind of fun and this would be actually really cute on this kind of a layout where you have the prompts you could kind of stamp and then stamp again without ranking so it was a piece of cards factors to show you you know the first time you stamp no it's that darker cano coral color than if you don't re ink and you stamp again you get a much lighter color and so if you you know, if you looked at all the colors that comes in and then you think that you can also do a second standing there really gives you a whole variety of colors that are that are there for you so that's anything about these thinks and you could kind of do that on this layout you could have stamped once and stamp again kind of right underneath it or off offset a little bit and that would have been a neat look as well ok, so I've kind of torn out an assortment of these I think I like the numbers first, so I want tio three in the scene for guess I don't know if they're not pull it out here it is and then I'll just pick others that kind of play up the colors of the page ok? And then all I'm going to do with ease it's kind of stagger them down the center and they're going to cover up kind of the scene between the photo and the journaling some of them will overlap onto the photos some of them will over a lot more on the journaling and I'm going to use kind of ah combination of a piece of foam and rather regular adhesive start maybe affair so what you guys thinking of the kits so far? If you've never tried one before you enjoying kind of having a limited a limited supply pile to kind of work through, do you find it too? Limiting? Do you enjoy kind of having it all pre coordinated for you? I can do it in this small four by three space and seven my nine by nine room waiting for you guys are laughing, you know what way have the small of and we're doing all this wonderful creative stuff and making four pages it's great and that's a really valid point because, you know, unless you have a huge dedicated room for scrap booking, it can quickly get out of control. So it's, nice to have if you have a small space or you just have a small desk in the corner of your bedroom, you could kind of put everything on there, and then when you're finished with the with crafting with that, can't you could store any of the leftovers in the folder that they come in. So that's that's a great bonus to also quite clearly that lots of the little leftovers could be used again. First, that seems a little pieces I'm interested in are to new moms leanne and jessica, because you're relatively new to scrap booking to jessica, you seems like you're doing something with highly scripted station that's right totally I am not I have the wrong call it kinda photo so I did something totally different holds out off the greg you can't totally different using the same kit though I didn't go that far off clock ticks people but you also don't some hand scripted journaling thiss was a picture of my grant may babies grandparents my parents and my brother and his wife came out to visit us and we did a little vacation when he was three months old and it was a big deal to get that picture so cool yeah family and how you doing over there? Well I'm upset I'm following exactly think of the great things I mean free expression is part of it is finding your own style and finding what works for you that's part of the fun of doing this and following this along you some of the other stamps it looks there really love this one too yeah, these little things that are really cute these little postage stamp designs and the colors are so pretty saying online that she adds coins that have been issued in the year that I'm making the book for says they're quite easy to put down all she puts in your pocket pages as well but if they're taped on the inside of the alberta couples is it's a really great cover for babies? That's a really good idea? Great idea absolutely ok, so I've got all of my little square stamps it here down now and I want it tio personalize this page with his initial appeared the top so I have another one of those metal rimmed circle tags that was in the kit and some just white embroidery thread and this stuff is great to have on hand I have ah bag that justice full of these threads and different colors and I found a great way to get a whole bunch of them at once for a good price is to look at a craft store in the kid's craft section they'll have like jewelry bracelet making kits from those friendship bracelets and the colors are really vibrant and they're really fun colors and and you get a whole bag of them for pretty cheap especially if you have a coupon or they're on clearance after the summer when they tend to come out so they last a long time but I use them for hands to chain on my pages um and also just things like this it's gonna tie little though there yeah a little wooden numbers and stuff and we've always been told about telling them that I said are they lingnan free do we know because everybody's using them now yeah, you know I've come across that question before I've seen people ask it on message boards and things I don't really know the answer that to be honest with you what I've always done if it's an item that I don't know if it's acid free and lignin free, I just make sure that it's not directly on my photo so I might have it on the paper somewhere else or on a separate tag or a layer in between it and the photograph. Um and you know, the thing is to see that used to be such a big thing and scrapbooking with making sure everything was acid free and living free and archive lee safe, you don't hear about it quite as much anymore maybe it's because it's so easy to just print off another copy of your photo um but yeah, it used to be a bigger deal than I think it is now, and if I was using very old heritage photos, I would probably always just make a copy just to be safe that wasn't glued down to a page, you know, because someone might want it later glued onto your scrapbook page. Okay, so I have my little middle room tag with a not at the top and I'm just going to get the w for will off his letter stickers just that's goes at the top of the page, it really could go anywhere it could go down here by your photograph or down at the bottom there, but I'm gonna put it at the top of mind I wanted to show you the completed page because this looks a little bear has thes prompts and there's no writing there um so it's gonna pull this one out? You can see them just used a black journalist pen and just answered the answer each prompt so it says around here it's a typical hectic morning trying to get three kids off to school on time and sometimes you're left half dressed in the chaos because he's running around in his one c which is very true at the time you know and it says remember those chunky monkey leg rolls you also have them on your arms at your little wrist and on your neck I'll miss this baby chumminess you know and that's fun fun idea for photos to is to take pictures of you know the baby parts you know the little wrist folds and their little ears and all those things because you soon forget how how small and and how cute they were um remember how much you love the mornings and afternoons when your brothers and sisters was coming home you missed them during the day and he used to cry at the door when they left to go to the bus um currently so this is the currently prompt currently you have a perpetual scrape on your nose as soon as it heals it seems you fall or bump it again and a new scrape appears it's a sign of how busy and active you are right now and so this was from him it was sixteen months old and I did worry that he would have a scar on his nose because as soon as one hell of a fall again but that was just a sign of what life is like with a toddler you know he's always fallen he's into everything so I love what this captures because I've actually scrapbook this photo before um a couple years ago I scrapbook it and I had it and it's a big eight by ten and it's like baby rolls or something and it was more just focused on like, oh, this is a cute picture but using these prompts and really like telling the story and behind the photo has a whole different meaning and so this page this layout is much more important to me than there is in this acute photo layout and it's even I mean this is something I just did a few weeks ago to prepare for this class and so even five years ago when I had took this picture I didn't write these things down but looking at the picture and kind of just thinking about what we were doing you know he's lies any dress was because it was the morning time and I remember you were like running around trying to get out the door so it's a way you can you know the memories will come as you look at the picture, they might not be as detailed as if you had written them down in real time, but I think it's still it's still possible to do this project even years out is online she's saying I love the tip to print and havel the photos ready but I'm struggling with the idea of what size because I haven't really thought about my layout yet. How do you know what's the best size to print me to recommend a standard size that will fit anything? No, I would say you know four by six is the standard size if you d'oh project life we're going to talk about in the next segment then you might also consider three by four photos for the smaller pockets but I would say probably four by six you can always you know if you're doing a design and you maybe you're following a sketch like we talked about and it calls for a larger photo and you really feel like you want that photo as an eight by ten you can always you know, reorder it, but I would say four by six what about you all do you find usually print four by six? Yeah, so who here actually thinks though entirely of their layout and how they're going to approach things before they then start with with photos or does he really just the two things come organically, it depend on the project? I think if you already know what you're planning on doing, like if I do a december daily, then I know they're all going to be really small photographs and maybe a couple, you know, five by seven so then I know which ones I want to put out, but if I'm working on a baby album so little, I mean, the four by six times standard side is better unless you're doing project life, and then you could fit in there. Yeah, and you might have photographs that you really just love and are drawn, teo and you might want to print those this five by seven or something just to have I mean, that's. A nice way to have a focal point. Uh, photograph on your page. It kind of really draws a viewer in, and then maybe a couple smaller accessory photos. Got a question from better hear the call? How much time do you spend journaling ahs an overall portion of your scrapbooking it's? Probably pretty quick for me, because, again, I don't write paragraphs and paragraphs on my pages, I like to do the bullet points and kind of these prompts and things like that so it's not too long I do usually save it till the end and sometimes that can be a bad thing because I run out of space for what I want to say so I have I have learned that that I need to be a little bit more forward thinking and plan it out better on my page but it's not too long for me unless he was asking have you taken any lettering classes to improve? How you journal oh, you mean like my handwriting lettering haven't happened? Well, becky hands who will be here next segment she did a whole book back in the day about you know, different lettering and if anybody remembers that, did you have it? Did you draft addition it's fun? S so now and you know, people I think and that brings up a good point is a lot of people I don't want to write too much in their scrapbooks if they don't like their handwriting, so they think, oh, my hand renee's ugly I don't want that in my book, but you know it's kind of like part of you and so I know I can recognize my mom's handwriting anywhere it's just distinctly how she writes so that's a neat piece of yourself to put into your books as kind of a little bit about you for your kids later on but of course you were saying earlier, and you're you're right about this. Nowadays, there are so many beautiful script funds, you can indeed type it out, and then you can reduce it to whatever size and printed it looks just is just beautiful. Now we have a couple questions about preservation that it has come in our flies asking the permanent tape blues do they turn color with age? I haven't found that. No, I have found that sometimes layouts that I have done years ago, I maybe didn't put enough he's adhesive on so that's something that I didn't realize at the time. But now that my layouts or ten years old and I look back and on, sometimes you open it up and some stuff has fallen down to the bottom of the page protector. So it's kind of made me realize now when I scrapbook, I need to probably use be a little bit heavier on the adhesive than I initially thought, but I haven't found it tio yellowing enough. Anybody in here has that was mary is concerned as well, you know, do scrapbooks age over time because she's thinking and, you know, the excessive twenty years when she wants to have these overdue, you do think there's an issue there with aging. I hope not. I'm not going on twenty years. What you write in here, the supplies are now on paper city and everything has changed means developed it's not quite the same way photographic paper, you know, twenty years ago was completely different, like different thing I needed you say the beauty is now a days you can reprint photographs and that's a great idea to you could you can take photographs of your layouts, you know, if you want, if you're worried about them, you know, preserving over time, that's another ideas to take a photograph of your page, you know, size it down to be you know you're twelve by twelve, and then you can upload it to a photo you know, printing, cite any of their print copies of it, or assemble them all into a photo book, and you'd have, like, a whole another scrapbook, but kind of a safety or a backup copy that would be there, or you could make a copy for each child. If you're doing like a found a family album and you're not re scrapbooking with paper again and again, you're just reprinting them as a photo book, so maybe another idea.