Paperclipping Roundtable | MICRO scrapbooking vs. MACRO scrapbooking

Hi everyone!

If you've come from the Paperclipping Roundtable, WELCOME!! I'm happy to have you here. :)

If not, if you're a regular visitor, you'll have to know that I had the amazing chance to be on the Paperclipping Roundtable one more time!! I was very happy that Noell gave me this opportunity. Thank you, Noell! :)
And thank you to both Noell and Izzy to make me feel comfortable each time, even when my ideas don't always come out as quickly as I would like them to come out and not worded the way I would like them to be and when my french tongue get all twisted in my mouth when I have an "h" to pronounce!!!! :)

I LOVED the topic!!!!

Micro-Scrapbooking Vs. Macro-Scrapbooking


After the show, I gathered some pages together to show you what I (as we heard from Karen, Noell and Melissa, this can be different for everyone) believe to be the difference between Micro-scrapbooking and Macro-scrapbooking.

Micro Scrapbooking:

To me, Micro scrapbooking is all about the little things that are happening on a day to day basis (I put the majority of them in my Project Life album and this is one of my most cherished album). The little things that are just a little bit bigger, the ones that let me a bigger feeling inside, get a page of their own.

For example: Arielle's first dance with a boy.

 (you can find more details about this layout and more detailed pictures here: First dance)

Or when Arielle and Maya learned Ice skating together and helped each other:
(translation of the title: Hold on to my hand)

(you can find more infos about this layout and more detailed pictures here.)

Most of the time, the micro stories are about my girls.
And I scrapbook them as they happen, depending on when I sit down to make a layout. If a "micro" story that just happened is still in my memory (I don't make lists anymore, I take mental notes and I figure that if the mental note sticks in my head long enough, then it is good enough to be scrapbooked!) I'll make a page about it.

Sometimes the micro stories are older, or are about my husband and I. Here I documented on one single page a trip we took just the two of us. The page is full of little snippets that happened during the trip.

(you can find the details here)

I also scrapbook way older "micro" stories, like here, when we got my dog when I was 6 years old.

Sometimes I mix together a "micro" story from now with a "micro" story from then that has something in common.

(Here's a layout with almost the same picture of me, my brother and my mom at Santa's Village in 1980 and a picture of me and my two girls 24 years later at the same spot)

If I have no subject coming to mind for a micr-story when I get to scrapbook, then I turn to my bigger story and I ask myself which bigger story I should/could tell next. Which part of my story is still missing?

Macro Scrapbooking:

Macro scrapbooking tells the bigger picture of our lives. To me it's like giving a context to all the smaller stories.  Both the Macro and Micro-Scrapbooking are important and worth it, but without the macro-pages I felt like something was missing when I was only capturing the little moments of our lives when I first started scrapbooking.

1. It could be a small event that changed the direction of your life: a wedding, a birth.

(Find the details about this layout here)

(These are the details surrounding my birth and my family as when I was born. You can see more details here.)

 (These two pages are a perfect way of telling in short a huge event. Up here is when I met my husband in Vancouver. I used 15 speech bubbles to summarize our whole 3 months together in Vancouver. These 15 little snippets can remind us of many details and of the whole way we met each other. It's the Micro-scrapbooking inside the Macro-scrapbooking I was trying to explain. It's like many details in an event of a bigger importance on my personal timeline.)

(And this page is just my recent thoughts about us meeting 15 years ago and making it through 15 years despite the ocean that was deciding our families. The translation of the title: 15 years ago, we chose each other.)

(a timeline is a perfect way of doing Macro scrapbooking. Find the details of this layout here)

(a summary of my life from birth to now, told with numbers, is a perfect example of Macro scrapbooking. Find the details here.)

(scrapbooking general things about a loved one is another great way of building the bones of your storybook. Find more details about this layout here.)

I think that both micro and macro scrapbooking are an important part of a scrapbook, but I think that a scrapbook without the macro scrapbooking would be just a collections of short stories with no connections between them like a book without a main story. The Macro scrapbooking is the cement that glues all the other stories together, if that makes sense.

I hope you'll go listen to the show if you haven't already. Karen (Grunberg), Melissa (Stinson) and Noell (Hyman) had very good points and ideas to share!!

Thanks for stopping by and talk to you soon!

Marie