There is NO Scrapbooking Police Blog Series

Hi everyone!

And welcome to day 9 of the blog series: 

There is NO Scrapbooking Police

I hope you could check out the other articles. If not, here's a list of all the articles/bloggers. 

August 4 - Paige Evans

A Scrapbooking page SHOULD always have a story and lots of journaling

August 5 - Ashli Oliver

Scrapbook pages SHOULD be fast and simple to just get them done

August 6 - Jen Gallacher

Scrapbook pages SHOULD look perfect

August 7 - Melissa Shanhun

Digital scrapbook pages should look as much like a paper page as possible 

August 8 - Ashley Calder

Scrapbooking SHOULD be done *this* way  

August 9 - Caroline Davis

A Scrapbooker SHOULD scrapbook FOR her family

August 10 - Lisa Harris

Scrapbooking SHOULD be a legacy for the scrapbooker's family

August 11 - Connie Hanks

A scrapbooker SHOULD follow the trends and be aware of what others think of her pages

August 12 - Marie-Pierre Capistran

A Scrapbooker SHOULD scrapbook chronologically

August 13 - Nancy Gaines

Scrapbooking SHOULD be 12x12 traditional paper pages

August 14 - Cara Vincens

A scrapbooker SHOULD always be caught up

Now, my "rule" is:

A Scrapbooker SHOULD scrapbook chronologically

Really? No way!  

Of course we can, if we want to, but we also surely can just use the next picture or story that inspires us. 

It's okay to scrapbook out of order, to mix photos from different time periods, and to scrapbook Halloween photo with a story that has nothing to do with Halloween...  It's fun to go over the what, where, when and to go a little bit further than where the picture is bringing us. :)

The way I scrapbook (and it's just ONE way of doing it, it doesn't mean it's the right way, or the only way) is that I let a story emerge into my head and my heart. Sometimes, yes, it's a current story that just happened and I scrapbook it "in order" so to say, but sometimes it's an older story that keeps popping into my head and that I catch myself telling over and over again. These stories have to get onto a page too!

Here are some examples of pages I made over time:
(excuse the lack of a new page, we are currently moving to a new State and I'm without scrapbooking studio since 3 weeks and living in a hotel since 2 weeks! Yikes!) 

Ok so here are the stories and ways I like to scrapbook my stories:

• Sometimes, I gather many stories of a time period and I put them all together on ONE page.  

Translation: Some things can only happen to me. When I was young... I would make people laugh, just by looking at them. I always needed to go to the bathroom. Especially when there was no toilet around! I tripping and falling down the stairs regularly. I almost fell out of the Thunder Mountain Train at Disney. I screamed so loud that the priestess had to stop his service because I found myself lost in the basement of the church.

On this page, I gathered a bunch of anecdotes that happened to me as a kid. The pictures are from the same time period, more or less. I don't really care if the photo is really what the story is about. Here, the stories happened between 1978 and 1982 (more or less) and all the pictures have also been taken between 1978 and 1982 (more or less).

• Sometimes, I'll experience something that I have already experienced in the past. I'll bring both events on the same page, focusing on the common ground between them:

Translation: Here I am at 3 years old with Louis Simon and mommy at Santa's Village and here I am 33 years later at the same place with Maya and Arielle. It was a funny feeling to see the giant rabbit again and to remember having seen it before.

On this page I have put together a picture of me and my daughters at Santa's Village in 2013 and a picture of my mom, my brother and I at the same exact spot in 1980.

It's fun to mix photos from different time periods, to compare one another, to highlight the resemblances or the differences, to document a tradition, a favorite activity, a favorite place to go, etc. It's funny how for this page I could have chosen many other photos. There was the one of my brother and I on the carousel that was just the same as the one of my daughters on the carousel. I'll probably make another page exactly like this one and possibly talk about how my brother and I ressemble my daughters!! :)

• Sometimes I'll scrapbook about an older event that I am very proud of, that had a big impact on my life and that I will never want to forget:

Here I made a double page about a Raid I participated to, in France. It was a race that was going on over 2 days. I survived! I did it with my husband. I was so very proud of myself because I never thought I could do something like this. I scrapbooked the event about 6 years after it happened. It's totally ok to go back 6 years behind. Or 20 years behind. Or one day behind. Scrapbook what makes you feel good!! 

• Sometimes I'll also use a picture of a person to talk about many little things that are related to that person:

This is a page about my grand-mother and every precious things I remember about her. I'm talking about the family gathering at her house, the little special things my cousins and I experienced at her house, the way she was, what I liked about her. It's a page about her that also tells a whole lot about me!

Here's another one about my grand-father and his love for flowers. The picture is very old and the quality is mediocre! LOL It was taken with a film camera and is all blurry and the exposure is just bad, but the picture is a perfect support to the story. Blurry or not, recent or not! A bad picture + a story is always better than no picture and no story at all! 

• Sometimes I'll use pictures that don't have very much to do with the journaling, just because they are related a little and because they inspire me and I want to put them on a page:

Here I used a headshot of my husband and one of myself on our wedding day and I mounted them on either side of a tree to talk about the "argument" we had when we had to decide the destination of our honeymoon.  The pictures are related to the wedding, and the honeymoon is also related to the wedding, that's the best link I find between the pictures and the story, but it works so well. :)

• It's also fun to make a time line or to put a bunch of stories together to get a bigger picture than just the small events that every picture represents on it's own: 

Translation: Crazy about cruises!

This page is grouping together all the cruises we have taken. It's fun to have them all illustrated on one page, to kind of have a bigger picture and a better overview. It doesn't mean I didn't scrapbook the cruises on their own. But it's another way of scrapbooking them.

And this is a timeline illustrating the big steps taken by my daughter.

There are so many other examples I could give you about how I choose the stories I want to scrapbook next. What I could tell you is to go with your heart and to scrapbook what you feel like scrapbooking at this very moment. I love the tips Ashli gave in her blog post. She said that if there's a story you don't want to forget, but that you're just not ready to scrapbook it just yet, write about it on a sheet of paper and put it in a page protector in your album. You can always come back to it later. This way, you won't forget the details. 

Scrapbooking this way (non chronological) helps me tell very profound stories, and to go way over the obvious. When I do this, the journaling comes out very easily and the stories are all precious! 

One last tip before I let you go: I store my pages in one album per person of the family. Not by years. It means that I don't have a 2014 album. This helps me to not feel like I am behind or that I have to scrapbook the next thing that happened. I skip from one album to another as the story hit my soul. :)

Voilà! I hope I could inspired you a little and I hope I could help you free yourself from the "you SHOULD scrapbook chronologically" false rule!! 

Have fun scrapbooking!! Marie