Scrapbook page ready for photo and journaling

I was in conversation with my mum this week, when on a visit, and she was voicing concerns about the fact that she had soooo many photos that she really “should” scrapbook. You know… all the ones she has inherited from her parents, along with all the photos of her life up to this point.

This is not an uncommon mis-conception that we are “supposed” to scrapbook certain things, the most usual being all the photos of the past no matter how distant, and then there’s all those holiday photos and baby photos… oh and other “relatives” photos…etc… etc.

Well STOP… the only thing that you are “Supposed” to be doing is Enjoying Yourself!  This is supposed to be FUN!  All the time you are staring at a Huge pile of photos that you think you have to scrapbook, you are freezing yourself into doing nothing because you are overwhelmed at the mere thought of such a mountain to climb.

My advice to get you out of the “frozen with fear zone” is that you can do one of two things…

You can start with a single page about something very recent.  The reason for this is that the thoughts, memories, emotions, etc are all still fairly fresh in your psyche and will be, therefore, easier to recreate on a page, such as journaling, or just the feel of the papers and embellishments you want to use.

Start with a photograph that you really like, the subject matter is immaterial.

The alternative to that is to make up a page(s) with no photos at all.  By that I mean to gather some of your favourite stash - papers, embellishments, and so forth and make up a page leaving space for a photo (and title and journaling even).

The picture here (with closeups in the gallery below) is a page I made this week to show this idea.  I have left space for a 6×4 photograph and made a journaling block which I can use for journaling AND a title if I want to.  The block is only temporarily tacked to the page at the moment so that I can replace it over the top corner of any photograph I add to the brown mat.  (I’ll talk more about this in another post)

I started by freehand drawing and then cutting out the polystyrene swirl, I was just playing with colours and some new products.  I then decided to use some papers which had bought that day (8.5×8.5 pad from K&Company “Que Sera Sera” - from CraftsUlove - who are not far from my Mum’s house, so I popped over… well it would have been rude not to wouldn’t it?!).

So here is the gallery bit… a new feature on this ‘ere blog… do you like it?