The Journaling Prompt and your Scrapertunities!

Those of you who have been following Nina's Art Spot on the Facebook page know all about the Journaling Prompts that I post every Tuesday. I have gotten a lot of PM's (private messages) asking many questions about them and how they pertain to scrapbooking. In our last Journaling 101 ~ Stuck for Content? post I explained all about the journaling prompt and how it can be utilized to generate ideas, in site into yourself and your environment. However, I think many still aren't seeing how this can be utilized as mini Scrapertunities. So I'm going to show you. 

Whats In My Purse page from my book all about me

Many years ago I was asked at a party as part of a game what items were in my purse.  It dawned on me while playing that game I'd have loved to know what my Mom carried with her in her purse. Since I had my daughters mini digital camera in my purse I decided to take a picture of all the items dumped onto the floor. It was that moment all those years ago (actual date unknown because I never dated it) that I started my Scrapbook. You see each of my kids have their own baby album that I've scrapbooked. I had tons of events scrapbooked about our lives. However, I failed to scrapbook anything about who I was/am for my children/family to ever know the inner workings of me! Goodness knows most of those photos either don't have me in them or they are really bad pictures of me. Hence the book all about me was started. Now I can't say I didn't have some help along the way. I don't remember if I bought the book or if it was given to me by one of my scrapbooking friends, but its a gem. 

The Book of Me by Angie Pedersen

Things I have learned along the way are simple. You MUST date each time you write in your Journaling Prompt planner and each time you turn your Journaling Prompt into a Scrapertunity. Some of the best Journaling Prompts happen kind of spontaneously, just like that day when I dumped my purse out on the floor. Take some pictures of yourself...yes a selfie if you will. This gives you the opportunity to oversee the quality of the YOU IMAGE and your children/family members will eventually get to see a side of you they haven't, the YOU side.

Tip: Use SnapChat face morph as a method to take fun pictures of YOU. Also SnapChat face morph seems to make me look less droopy and "old". Its great! Take the SnapChat pic then screen shoot it and delete the image before posting. It never goes viral and you get the picture! 

Ok so lets take an actual prompt from the Facebook Page and put it into action. June 12, 2016 the Journaling Prompt was...

My Original Journaling: "The best advice I got was from my Dad. He told me that if I wanted to be a good cook the most important ingredient I needed to remember to include was my love. This taught me the importance of loving what you do. My Dad was a wonderful artist. He made incredible pieces of woodwork. Wood was his medium. His second medium was food. He was a wonderful teacher and a wonderful Dad."

"Birdy" my Journaling Prompt Journal

Now thinking about my Dad makes me sad because he has passed and I miss him so very much. When I wrote this it was because I have a  kids cookbook he gave me when I was about 6 or 7 years old. He inscribed the cookbook for me and I still have that cookbook. The cover has long ripped off but I've saved it. I think its time to turn this Journaling Prompt into a Scrapertunity and preserve a wonderful gift, an incredible sentiment and a lasting lesson. This is creating a lasting legacy at its finest!

Tip: Go small if big is overwhelming. Most of my family scrapbooks are done at the standard 12" x 12" size and at least 2 page spreads. My books all about me are 9" x 9" in size and usually only 1 page.

So I will now create a 9" x 9" Single page scrapbook page for my book all about me. I will use a copy of the inscription to replace an actual photo. I could possibly also add a photo of my Dad in the page. I will also include the journaling from my Journaling Prompt Journal along with the date I wrote the original journaling. 

If you are interested in the Journaling 101 in video format please keep an eye out for the Journaling 101 YouTube video that will be posted in the coming weeks.

Journaling 101 ~ Stuck for content? It's all about the prompt.

Let me set the scene. You've just completed an awesome scrapbook two page layout and you have your photo's of your child's Soccer final high school game from last week. Now to buckle down and add your journaling. Easy Peasy, right you already know the details. You just apply the basics. But what if you have a rockin' scrapbook layout and don't know what to display on it? or worse you want to scrapbook but have no idea what to scrapbook. This is where the awesome PROMPT comes in handy. 

So you may ask...What is a journaling prompt? Let me clarify.

A journal prompt is a statement/question/suggestion designed to inspire you or suggest a direction to write or scrapbook. No matter how much you enjoy writing or have ideas for what to scrapbook about, the day will come when you are out of ideas. It is a good idea to have a source to pull prompts from.  Journal prompts you have saved can be used to help get past a block or even to inspire you. 

Now to review the basics of your journaling block.

Basics:

1. When ~ Date
2. Where ~ Location
3. Who ~ People involved
4. What ~ What were they doing
5. Why ~ Why were they doing it or there.

Here is an example, back to our child's soccer game example above:

1. When ~ Last week
2. Where ~ The High School
3. Who ~ You and your child...the team
4. What ~ Playing Soccer
5. Why ~ Last game in High School

Birdy my Journaling Planner

Journaling Prompt Binder 

Whenever I come upon a good journaling prompt I tuck it away in my "Journaling Prompt" binder and then answer them in my A5 journaling planner. In my journaling planner (which I've named Birdy) I create a page that I date and indicate the original prompt and where I got it. Its my go to place when I'm stuck on what to write or even what to scrapbook. 

Here are a few examples of how to use a journaling prompt.

Sample Journaling Prompts

• My favorite movie is _________

          My answer: My favorite movie is also my favorite book, To Kill A Mockingbird by 

          Harper Lee. I saw this movie for the first time in high school (psst...shhh...in 1980, not 

          to date myself). 

So then based on this information I will do a brain dump regarding my answer to the prompt question. This will inspire what direction to go for the layout. A brain dump is a "dump" of words phrases ideas based off a specific subject from your brain to some other storage medium, such as paper, your computer or even a note on the App, Voxer.

                           Brain Dump: Scrapbook paper with text like from a book, movie film 

                           journaling blocks, '80's memorabilia, Scout (a character from the book), a big 

                           tree trunk with a space to hid things, Boo (another character from the book), 

                           Front image of the book, Harper Lee the author, etc.

The Layout based off my brain dump:  So based on my brain dump I could do multiple different things. I could create a base page with scrapbook paper that is pure text. I could do a 3 1/2" x 5" photo matte and instead of a photo I could put a picture of the front of the book. I could create a long strip of movie film and instead of film in the spaces I could add my text for the journaling. I could find a die cut of an old looking tree with gnarly looking knots in it to run up one side of the page. I could have a title topper My Favorite Movie.

The Journaling: In my 1980 English class with Ms. Benton we read Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird as part of the curriculum. Once we finished reading and analyzing the book we had a chance to watch the 1962 black and white movie with Gregory Peck, Robert Duvall and Mary Badham. The book and movie is about Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck who is a depression era lawyer in the south. The book follows the events as he defends a black man against an undeserved rape charge, and his kids against prejudice. At the time I saw this movie I was drawn in by the southern ways depicted from the time period. I was also pulled in by the relationship between Atticus and his daughter Scout. Scout reminded me of my inner self at that age, about 6-9. She was precocious and outspoken for her age. Harper Lee is an incredible author and To Kill A Mockingbird was her first novel. She won a Pulitzer prize for it.

Now you maybe wondering why you would want to scrapbook something like this. Something about yourself. A non-event so to speak. The answer is simple. Because your family wants to know things about you. Who you were when you were a kid and who you are now.

• What scares you?...Why?

          My answer: I am scared of rodents. I've never discovered why I'm afraid of them but 
           when I see them in real life or on TV I loose all common sense. When I see them in 
           a book or a still picture of them I get the chills and the creeps.

                  Brain Dump: Beady eyes, tails.....well ok you get the idea...I'm getting the          
                   creeps just thinking about it.

Now we could go a few ways with this prompt: 
1.) Do I already have pictures taken of me responding to a sighting? If so then I could scrapbook the basics of the event. (thankfully there are no pictures of me during a sighting!) or 
2.) I could scrapbook about the fear itself or fears in general or a scrapbook page titled "Our Family's Fears" 
With the second possibility, "Our Family's Fears" I could get images that describe each persons fear and then list who it belongs to. I could take that a step further and even do a matching game on a scrapbook page. I could mount pictures of each family member on a matte with a blank back side and hinge mount it to the scrapbook page. The journaling is behind each photo, creating a flip. These photo/journaling mattes would be on one side of the layout and then the images depicting the fears on the other side. Using a brad I could attach a piece of bakers twine to each of the fear images and just an empty brad next to each of the family member photo mattes. I would then make a small hole in the page protector next to each brad with bakers twine. Now I would feed the bakers twine through the hole. Make a larger hole in the page protector for the empty brad on the other side. Now your creepy fears page is interactive. The scrapbook viewer now has to guess who's fear belongs to which family member. I could write a journaling block for each persons fears. Describing the fear and even putting into quotes what the family member said as their "Why" 

For example.

The Journaling:  Nina is afraid of rodents. She has had this fear for as long as she can remember. She doesn't understand her fear and why she gets so creeped out by them. She has no desire to overcome her fear.

I hope this has helped you understand the advantage of stock piling and using journaling prompts. I encourage you to create your own way of filing or saving the journaling prompts you come across. To get you started below is a sign up for a FREE June Journaling Prompt Printable. 

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Like the Nina's Art Spot Facebook page and share your method of filing or saving Journaling Prompts by end of the day on June 30th, 2016 and you will be automatically entered to receive the July Journaling Prompt Printable.

Journaling 101 ~ The Text Issue

Within the spectrum of Journaling 101 there are many issues. The first I wanted to talk about are the possible hand writing issue's.  Now I'm not a "set in stone" kind of creator but at times I have to set some rules for myself. These rules force me outside my comfort zone. I don't believe all your lasting legacy books (Scrapbooks) have to have journaling but there is something to be said about the STORY behind the images...these stories are what creates the "mortar" within our books of lasting legacy, setting the flow of the story being told.

Writing in our scrapbooks isn't always an issues for everyone. Some people, like myself, struggle with it while others find it natural. Although I've been told my handwriting is nice, it always seems to look horrid to me and I even took a hand-lettering course in college. When I want it to look exceptionally nice for a layout it seems to go south, and I don't mean Arizona south I'm talking deep Mexico city south.

So here are my top three tips for hand-lettering issues. Either you have to become friends with your own flourishes and make nice nice with what you have, invest some time and possibly some money and take a hand-lettering class or find a hand writing alternative.

Here are six of my favorite alternatives to my own "scratch" issues.

1.) Use your computer and print out your journaling blocks. You can print onto vellum or other surfaces and get some really nice results.
2.) Use a FREE app or online software that enables you to generate some nice looking text with or without images. Either print them as photos, cut and mount them or print them on alternative surfaces direct from your own printer. I prefer picmonkey.com. They have several FREE options. There are many apps on phones like photocollage etc. that will do nearly the same thing but directly onto the photo you want to have printed.
3.) I've seen some wonderfully artistic and creative things done with word stickers. You could compile your words for your journaling from different resources of stickers leaving you with a mismatch of funky word texture. The proverbial "ransom note" effect, if you will.
4.) Use quotes for journaling from purchased quote pack's. By using a quote relative to the event your scrapbooking then simply adding the date below in your own hand writing. This can leave lots of room for doodling (which I have a huge fondness for) this of course is a minimalist approach to the hand writing avoidance issue.
5.)Find someone who's hand-lettering you like and get them to write out your journaling block for you. Or have multiple people as a "go to" source. Whats even more fun is to find multiple people who have vastly different writing styles and ask them to each contribute and mix match.

    and of course when all else fails 

6.) Cut out multiple pieces of cardstock for your journaling block to leave yourself mistake room. Try pre-writing it in pencil then going over it with a journaling pen. Sometimes this can help in eliminating the need for the additional pieces of cardstock.

I would like to interject here that for the future viewer of your books of lasting legacy, it is interesting for them (especially your children) to see what your hand-lettering has looked like over the years. So while you more than likely dislike "going there" you need to...They Need to see it! So maybe bargain with yourself and use your own hand lettering at least once every 10 layouts. wink wink ok every 20!