Jen on the Pick a Year Challenge
Jen on the Pick a Year Challenge
This month’s Nerd Nest Challenge is to Pick a Year. For an extra dose of inspiration on this challenge, my friend Jen is here to share her take with you!
I love having goals in my scrapbooking. It keeps me on track with telling the stories I want to tell. I have many many lists of pages I’d like to make, and I love checking them off. If I start getting bored with a particular topic, I can always move on and come back to it later.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of a very important year in my life. 2005 was the year I met and married my husband, the year my sister graduated from high school, my last year of college, so many things! I want to concentrate on scrapping some of those memories before they fade away.
Figuring out a way to tackle 2005 has been a bit challenging. Prior to last year I hadn’t scrapped much about 2005. I don’t have very many photos, and a lot of them are pretty bad. But I’m not letting that stop me. I’ve found a lot of inspiration, sometimes from unexpected sources, for scrapping my stories. Here are some of my favorite places to find inspiration, and how I plan to use them to continue to document 2005
Take a class
Taking a class can give you a lot of inspiration to scrap a particular year. Taking the Romantic Scrapbooking class from Noelle Hyman was the catalyst for me to start documenting the origin story for my relationship with my husband. But you can really take almost any class and use it to document a particular year, whether it’s a layout design class or topic-based. I’m looking forward to using prompts from My Details and Journal Your Christmas later this year.
Mine for stories
Another big inspiration for documenting 2005 was Megan’s “mine for stories” challenge post awhile back. Since Jason and I were in a long distance relationship, we have practically our whole lives documented in emails, chats, and my (very embarrassing) old LiveJournal blog. It’s been a lot of fun going back and finding things to scrap from those, many that I’d totally forgotten about! Earlier this year I got a bunch of documents from one of my dad’s old computers that I used during 2005. I’m hoping it has old college work or something I can use to document that part of my life.
Get inspired by product.
Sometimes you see a kit and a story just hits you and you have to scrap it right.this.second. That’s what happened to me when I saw this honeymoon kit and this ampersand text path. Things magically clicked in my brain and it’s one of my favorite pages. I don’t usually advocate waiting for the “perfect” kit to scrap your stories, but if the perfect kit just happens to come along, use it!
Use your photos.
So let’s talk about wedding photos for a minute, ok? (Stay with me, this can apply to any big event, vacation, etc.) This might sound weird, but I don’t ever want to have a completed wedding album. I love the idea of revisiting these photos year after year and telling different stories. Or no story at all. Sometimes I just want to scrap a pretty photo in a pretty way with pretty supplies. And that’s ok! There is room for all kinds of pages in my books. Sometimes you just have a ton of photos without a ton of stories, so go ahead and make something pretty.
Go photo-less.
Or you can forget about that altogether, and just go photo-less. Since most of my stories from 2005 don’t have pictures, I made the decision early on to scrap them anyway. It’s been a challenge to figure out ways to make my pages look different, but I’m not super worried about that. You can take almost any photo spot in a sketch or template and use a journaling card or tag instead. Thinking of it that way opens up a whole world of possibilities for your layout design.
Add to a story you’ve already told.
One of my biggest sources for inspiration is my own scrapbooks. I love looking at the pictures and reading about things I haven’t thought about in years. It almost always triggers more story ideas. Sometimes it reminds me that I have more to say. I’ve already scrapped the story of receiving these flowers, but looking through my scrapbook reminded me of some pictures I had of my sister’s cat with them. And who doesn’t need more kitty pictures in their scrapbooks, right?
Writing this post has given me even more ideas of things to scrap. Here are a couple more sources of inspiration I plan on using throughout the year to document 2005.
Use a current photo to tell an older story.
We take a lot of photos of seemingly random places and things. I think of them as my own personal stock photography library. They don’t necessarily tell a story in the moment I take them, but often they can be used to illustrate another story. I’m so glad we’ve taken so many pictures of the places we go, because a lot has changed over the years.
Do a Now and Then page.
I love telling stories that span over several years. That’s really one of my very favorite things in scrapbooking, making connections over time. I did this when we went to New Orleans last year. Jason and I are planning to visit some of the places that have been special in our relationship this year. I’m hoping that will give me lots of opportunities for more Now and Then type pages. They will go in this year’s album, but they’ll be inspired by photos we took in 2005.
I hope this has given you a few ideas to scrap a particular year from your past. It can be challenging, especially if you’re limited on photos. But it’s so rewarding! And stories breed stories. Once you’ve started documenting a year in-depth, you’ll probably discover you have a lot more to say than you originally thought.
I’d love to hear if you try any of these, or if you’ve ever taken the time to concentrate on one year in your life.
Jen Johnson is originally from Nashville, but ran away to South Florida to marry a boy she met on the Internet. She has always been a memory keeper, but never realized it until she discovered digital scrapbooking in 2009. Now she loves to document her life in SoFlo with her husband, stepson, and cat, cleverly named Miss Kitty. Her biggest scrapbook is the “All About Jen” book. She worries that might sound narcissistic, but who else is more qualified to tell her story? She loves to travel, read, eat good food, and watch bad TV. She has a blog, hclappy scraps, where she writes about digiscrapping, minimalist Project Life, (step)motherhood, and her search for that ever-elusive “healthy lifestyle” everyone talks about. She says Y’all and Yonder a lot, loves run-on sentences, and finds it a bit awkward talking about herself in third person.
