Category Archives: Topics to Scrap

Supplies: Not Pictured by Allison Pennington, Fonts are Blackout and The Only Exception

We live in a family of daily and weekly routines. I know there are many families like mine, where the day-to-day doesn’t vary much.

From a scrapbooking perspective: What memories should we capture then? Can we maintain momentum on a project like P365 or Project 52? I think so!

I do a weekly double-page spread using the simple gridded style of pocket scrapbooking. Here are some ways that I’ve documented our routines and daily happenings in our family.

Incorporating the Random

I try to take photos most days of the week, but February is historically my slowest photo month. This year was no exception. Some weeks, like the one below, I only had a handful of photos to use. Worse still, I didn’t take many notes about the week – even scanning my email and Facebook and phone didn’t help. I managed to put together this weekly layout by relying on a few random lists and quotes:

Supplies: Pockets Stitched No. 6 by Valorie Wibbens, Pagekraft by One Little Bird, Kraft Edition Project Life

I filled out the week with ideas like:

• Movies I had seen in the year to date
• A list of 10 movies I love
• A few random quotes from my kids
• Noting how much we love pasta in the winter (since that is one thing I did take a picture of during the week)

I don’t take the idea of Project 52 too literally – I scrap a weekly spread, but every photo and piece of journaling doesn’t have to be perfectly tied to the week. If it relates to my life in the general time period, I’m okay with including it. For example, I think there is value in noting the movies I’ve watched to date. It’s not something I want to document each and every week, but a round-up on the occasional weekly layout is a nice reminder for the future.

Rely on Photos to Document the Now

I must have been feeling bad about the general lack of February photos, because at the very end of February and into March, my volume of photo-taking dramatically improved.

Supplies: Pockets Stitched No. 6 by Valorie Wibbens, Pagekraft by One Little Bird Designs, Midnight Edition by Liz Tamanoha

Supplies: Pockets No. 6 Stitched by Valorie Wibbens, Pagekraft by One Little Bird Designs, Kraft Edition Project Life by Tiffani Smith, Black & White: Labeled by Michele Godin, Date It by Penny Springmann, Doodlings 1 by Emily Merritt, Get Artsy by Jenn Barrette

These were weeks where “nothing” happened – no birthdays, anniversaries, job changes, house moves, babies born, or any other one of life’s major milestones. Just regular weeks in the life of our family.

To document the weeks, I took photos of the little moments:

• Us on our commute
• My daughter modeling clothes at the mall
• The result of a major snowstorm
• The before and after of cleaning out my pantry
• A few incredibooth (an iPhone app) shots
• My kids being silly
• The messy spots and neat spots in my home
• Food prepared and enjoyed

I like these pages. They’re some of my favourites in my album because they’re so *us*, right now.

Other People’s Stories

During the week below, I borrowed the photos and story of the hockey game from my husband and it takes up 1/4 of the weekly layout.

Supplies: Pockets Stitched No. 6 by Valorie Wibbens, Pagekraft by One Little Bird Designs, Midnight Edition by Liz Tamanoha

My project is about my family, but it’s clearly in my voice. Sometimes though, big things happen to my husband or my children, and I want to share them. I ask to borrow copies of photos from friends and family for situations where I don’t have any of my own and most of the time they’re happy to provide them to me. For journaling, I’ll ask them about what happened and then retell the story on a journaling card. I enjoy how these stories add context to the overall project album.

Note the Little Moments

Supplies: Pockets Stitched No. 6 by Valorie Wibbens, Pagekraft by One Little Bird, 4×6 Photo Collages No. 1 by Designs by Lili, Seafoam Edition Becky Higgins Project Life

I won’t always be the mom to two small children. Already I can see that the little baby days went by in the blink of an eye. I suspect the years of raising school agers will go by just as quickly and then I’ll have teenagers. As much as I may wish to try, I can’t stop the clock. The only thing I can do is note the moments and savour them.

If you’re interested in more ways to document your daily life, try these past articles:

• But My Life Isn’t Interesting Enough for December Daily
• Wondering What to Scrap?
• Does Project Life Fit in with My Life?
• Capturing Real Life Moments

Image created using 365 Stamps by Wild Blueberry (altered)

I LOVE creating year in review layouts and albums! It’s the perfect way for me to take some of my favorite photos from the year and put them on one layout. A year in review layout is a fun way for me to showcase events that happened each month through out the year (since I normally don’t love scrapping events).

We’ve done posts on this before:

• Quickly Creating A Year-In-Review Album
• 2009 – the year in review
• Truly Inspiration – Year In Review
• New Year’s Eve, Last Chance for TDF10, & Year-In-Review Layouts

Typically, when I’m creating a year in review layout, I go through my photo folders by month (they are organized chronologically by year, then month) and pull out the photos I love and that represent the year to me. I use FotoFusion to automatically create a collage for me with all of my photos. Here are some other programs that will create collages for you:

• Quick and Easy Collages
• Picasa – A free & Useful Tool in your Digi Scrap toolbox

For one of my year in review layouts for 2012, I decided to document my travels, which were abnormally frequent this past year:

Layout by Steph, supplies used: free map template by Nettio (there is also a tutorial for creating your own), Vagabond by One Little Bird, font is Smith Primiere Schutzy.

I have a New Year’s Eve tradition where I work on a Year in Review Album and I’m looking forward to that again this year (I missed last year). I will most likely do photo collages using one of the programs mentioned above OR some scripts that will place photos in a template for me.

I thought I would share a few of the fun templates I’ve seen popping up around digiland:

Michelle Batton’s templates that are included in The Digi Files through the end of December 2012:

A year in review by Penny Springmann

From Studio Basic:

I think this is a GREAT idea and would create a super quick Year In Review Album:

Cindy Schneider has a lot of Year in Review templates. If this link doesn’t pull them up, just do a search for “year in review cindy” and it will pull up 6 packs.  Here’s the link to the templates below.

There are many, many templates out there that can be used for a Year in Review album. They don’t need to have the months on them in order to work. Just look through the template section of your favorite store, you are bound to find something great!

Have you created a 2012 Year in Review layout or album? Link us up in the comments! We would love to see your work!

I was raised a football fan. I’ve always enjoyed a good football game. I understood the rules, the calls, and knew what was going on, because I grew up watching the game. As I started having kids though, spending that many hours watching a game, became less and less of a priority in my life. As a result, I don’t watch or follow sports at all anymore. However, I do understand that there are people that LOVE their sports and even more, love their teams! I thought it would be fun to share some examples of layouts about fanatics. I’m not talking about the teams your own kids play on, but the teams many of you cheer on no matter who is playing, and who is winning or losing.

Let’s start with my own silly story:

Layout by Steph, supplies: Play The Game by Chelle’s Creations, Printing Primer font.

Journaling reads:
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the first “game day” after we moved to Idaho. I was out running errands. I went to the doctor and everyone was wearing blue and orange. I didn’t think too much of it. But, when I walked in Costco and all of the employees were wearing blue and orange and many of the shoppers as well, I realized I had missed the memo.

I don’t follow sports at all. I didn’t even know the colors of Boise State University, let alone know that they had a highly ranked football team …at the time. I felt very uncomfortable as I watched the people around me with curiosity. Wondering if it was a team they were all decked out for. I knew there were no professional teams in the area. I was used to Seahawk team pride and Mariners. I kept trying to catch glimpses of the logos on shirts, without seeming like I was staring. The minute I got in the car, I called Matt and said, “What team is blue and orange and why is everyone wearing those colors today?” He laughed good and hard and said, “You mean, you don’t know about ‘Smurf Turf’?” No, I did not!

After all of this time, it is still a little shocking to my system when football season starts. The amount of team pride in the state is…unique. I’ve honestly never seen anything like it…anywhere. This year, I announced to the family that we needed to conform and become fans, or at least pretend to be. Matt quickly ran to get me a BSU T-shirt, which I wore once. I figure if I’m going to pretend to be a fan, I at least need to know when they play…and maybe even what team they are up against. So, it didn’t happen this year. Maybe in 2013. For now, I’ll just sit on the fanatic sideline and watch with curiosity.

Photo: Sept. 15,2012 Journaling Nov. 23, 2012.

Layout by Jacki, supplies: Game Time by Lori Barnhurst, MVP by Dani Mogstad, stamps by Michelle Coleman, football graphics by Kate Hadfield.

Layout by Jacki, supplies used: Chelle’s Creations “Slam Dunk.”

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The following layouts are linked to their sources with credits:

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Kimberly was excited to share the experiences of being a Dodger fan as a child with her husband:

Do you have a fanatic in your life? Are you a fan of a team? Have you scrapped your own team pride? If you have, share a link with us. If you haven’t, maybe you feel inspired?

The Daily Digi’s very own Heather was recently married and we all want to wish her and her new husband a long and happy marriage! Congratulations, Heather!

As I approach my 10 year wedding anniversary, it occurs to me that it might be time to finally scrap my wedding!

So in honour of love and marriage, let’s browse some lovely wedding scrapbook pages!

I love the super fun photo, repeated several times, paired with the doodled elements on this page by Paula:

Isn’t this page by Dutch_Diva beautiful? What a magical way to show off a wedding photo!

Gwendlite made a very pretty and delicate page for her wedding memories:

Suladesign captured the food at a wedding. Considering the time brides spend on choosing the perfect meal, this is a great idea!

Nessita made this stunning page. I love how the couple is spilling outside the photo frame and how the photo changes into a line drawing!

On this fun page, Dotcomkari paired words from her wedding vows with photos from the wedding day.

LESSON LEARNED

After looking around the galleries at all the beautiful wedding pages, my biggest take-away lesson is that wedding scrapbook albums/pages should be about evoking feeling. Many of us have separate wedding photo albums so the wedding scrapbook album can be an opportunity to pair photos with words to document the details and feeling of the day.

AND A FEW WORDS TO NEWLYWEDS…

To everyone who has recently married, all I can say is that, in the blink of an eye, you’ll be creating pages like this one by Crystal, celebrating your 10 year anniversary:

PS – The title graphic was created using Awakening by Joyce Paul at Pink Poppy Press.