scrapbooking

05 February 2013

Our ‘Rick & Ronnie’ memoir books

I don’t usually do two memory-keeping posts one after another, but for some reason, I felt a strong urge to share this with you today. It’s a special post – one that I’ve been wanting to do for ages. It’s about a scrapbook that’s particularly precious to me. It’s one that records the story of us: Rick and Ronnie. I call this our ‘R&R Memoir Book.’ Even though Rick and I got together back in 2003, it wasn’t until a year and half ago that I finally put this together. I’d started other ‘versions’ of it in the past but none of them felt right. I was so happy with the way this one came together, and so far, it’s continued to work well.

Basically, this scrapbook – or series of scrapbooks to be more accurate – is a way for me to record our journey together as a couple. From the time we began ‘courting’ (don’t you just love that term) through to our engagement through to our wedding through to our early years of marriage through to falling pregnant with Cameron through to losing Cameron through to the arrival of our other boys and hopefully through to the next sixty or seventy years together. At the end of the day, our relationship – our marriage – comes first even before our family, and it is a relationship that is worth documenting and celebrating.

First up, I had to choose an album to use. This was before I knew about Project Life, so I mainly looked at my favourite stationery brands here in Australia: Kikki K, Coral Coast, Corban & Blair and Boheme. In the end, I settled on Kikki K’s cloth dry mount album because it was simple and classic, and I liked the idea of black pages. It came in both red and black, and I ended up getting the black version for our family scrapbooks (again, this was before I discovered Project Life) and the red version for us. I chose the extra large size so that I could include more photos on each page if I wanted, and yet the albums were still able to fit into the A3 memory boxes that I’d planned to use.

Also, I knew that I would be able to customise the cover with some simple white numeric stickers (also from Kikki K) to specify the years that each individual album spanned. The one shown in this post is the second album in the series and obviously covers the years from 2008 to 2011. The first album spans the first five years of our relationship and has ’03-08′ on the cover. It’s a simple system that I can easily add to over time.

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15 November 2012

Project Life, Weeks 32 and 33 (and lots of insert goodness)

Weeks 32 and 33 continued the documentation of our family holiday back in August. For the first time since I started Project Life back in May, I actually did a double spread for a single week. Talk about living dangerously, right? I’m glad I did it though: despite the fact that we didn’t go anywhere, our holiday was nonetheless full of precious memories which I’m glad to have recorded in our Project Life album. In addition to the double spread, there were also a few extra inserts which I’ll also show you today (you can click on each image for a larger version).

Most of the photos I include in our family Project Life album are the ones taken on my iPhone. However, I made an exception here because we were spending so much time with the boys in the holidays, so I decided to include a few portrait shots that I took using our Canon EOS (and yes, most portrait shots take place at the meals table because that’s when they’re all sitting down properly!). That smaller black and white photo in the middle, with the boys in the foreground and the buildings in the background, is one of my favourite photos as it has such a dramatic feel to it (whereas in reality they were just running around hysterically, wanting Rick to pick them up and swing them around).

Yup, drinking fruit smoothies, driving into the bush and watching the sunset down at the beach pretty much sums up a large portion of our holiday! I also adore that picture of Angus and Pete in the top right – it’s a lovely little snapshot of their friendship. Oh, and I’m giving myself extra brownie points for including not one but two photos of myself on this page – even if one of them is simply of my shadow…

Those sweet little moments between Angus and Pete continue on this page, along with snapshots of our various expeditions to cafes and yum cha restaurants. And of course, the sea. Always the sea.

As you can, I loved the 8×8 insert format from Week 31 so much that I decided to make it an ongoing staple. In this instance, it was the perfect way to showcase our trip to the Sturt gardens and cafe in Mittagong. Looking at a storyboard like this makes me so happy.

Week 33 was the first spread in which I used more black and white photos than colour ones, and I quite liked the effect of it. As a matter of practice, I don’t often convert photos to black and white. However, here I felt that the colours in the original images of the beach were too stark and distracting. By stripping them away, and leaving only black and white, it adds drama and interest and draws the eye to what Rick and the boys are actually doing inside the photo. (You’ll also notice that I moved ‘Week 33′ up from the bottom of the photo, to make it work with the image that I had chosen.)

In contrast to the previous page, I do love the different shades of blue here. This was the week we discovered Freshwater for the first time (it only took us eight months). I remember how fun it was to explore a new beach. Not only was it small, cosy and generally empty, there was even a small playground nearby and a kiosk near the car park that sold great coffee. That was a good day, that one.

Rick and I were very fortunate that week to be able to sneak away for one night to one of our favourite places in the south: the Acacia House in Milton. I wrote a post about it here, and I wanted to include the post in the album as a more detailed record of our ‘romantic getaway.’ I simply used the 6×12 template that I had already designed for past weeks.

And because I took so many photos at the gorgeous bed & breakfast, I simply had to include them in yet another 8×8 insert…

And that’s it! Our 2012 family holiday recorded for us to look back on in years to come. I love that I didn’t need to do anything separate for the holiday – it just fit right into the rest of our Project Life album, simply with extra inserts and one cunning double spread.

I would love to know – how do you guys record or document your holidays?

You can read my other Project Life posts here.

Materials used: Becky Higgins Design A page protector; American Craft 8×8 page protector; Kodak 170gsm glossy photo paper. All photos printed on the Canon MP630 Pixma.

(Linking up with The Mom Creative and Kootoyoo.)

29 Comments

13 July 2012

A visual journal of sorts

When I first started high school, I began keeping a handwritten journal. It was one of those ‘dear diary’ ones, and it was filled with all my emotional angst from those early years of being a teenager. That lasted about a year. In my early twenties, I started journalling again. This time on my computer. Day in, day out, I logged my daily activities as well as bits and pieces of conversations with friends. It read a bit like a news report, except that it was not all that interesting a read. When Cameron died five years ago, I took to journalling by hand again. Every day, as I sat by our bedroom window, forlorn, empty, heart-broken and grief-stricken, I would pour my heart out into a beautiful green leather notebook. Writing in that notebook kept me sane and allowed me to get through each day. A lot of that writing I put online onto Cameron’s website, for family and friends to read.

Last year, on my thirty-first birthday, I decided to start a journal again. But I wanted to do something different this time. I wanted it to be more about images rather than words. And I wanted it to be something that was just for me, as opposed to something for the family or the children. A personal, visual journal of sorts.

The first thing I did was to find a notebook that would suit the purpose. I wanted something that was about A5 in size (ie. smaller than all the children’s scrapbooks), that used recycled paper, that had a leather cover and that was hand-bound. I didn’t want something that was sold to the mass market, so I turned to Etsy for my online search. The result was this beautiful white journal from the shop badgerandchirp. The best part was that I could specify the exact size I wanted as well as the number of pages to go into the notebook. Perfect.

In the beginning, I filled a couple of pages with words despite the visual direction that I wanted to take. I wrote about my birthday, and I wrote down all the negative emotions I was feeling one particular day. It was helpful for me to see at a glance everything that I was struggling with, because all of a sudden, life didn’t seem too big or too overwhelming once it was down on paper.

But thereafter, I began filling the pages with photos like I intended. To keep a somewhat consistent style, I only selected photos that had been processed with my CrossProcess iPhone app. Whereas my criteria for the boys’ scrapbooks were to choose photos that depicted a special moment for the child, my photo-selection method for this personal journal was to only choose my favourite photos throughout the year. This was a much narrower criteria and the reason for it was because I wanted the journal to be a personal memoir of my favourite moments. I didn’t need it to be comprehensive like the boys’ scrapbooks. The purpose was not to record everything, but to highlight and pay tribute to the events or the moments in time that were especially meaningful to me.

I think this is one of the most useful things to do when it comes to journalling or memory-keeping: work out what you want the particular scrapbook, journal or photo album to achieve (in other words, what is its purpose?) and then lay down a set of criteria (or boundaries) which you then use to create the content. For me, this is the key to starting, maintaining and finishing something.

Again, I chose to keep the content and aesthetic as simple as possible. Here’s an overview of my process:

I selected the photos I wanted in Aperture and printed them 8 to an A4 page.
I used a black felt tip pen for writing and no embellishments at all.
For each page, I chose either a single standalone photo or a small ‘set’ of photos that went together.
I started each new photo (or new set of photos) on the right hand page.
I always wrote down the corresponding date, because I know the future me would want to be able to see immediately when the photos were taken.
I gave each photo or set of photos a simple title – just enough to ‘complete’ the photo or photos.
For single photos, I centred it on the page. The title would then go above it, and the date below it.
For each set of four photos, I used a simple 2×2 layout. Again, the title would go above, and the date below.
Where a set contained three photos, I would adopt the same 2×2 layout, except leave one of the photo spaces empty. I would then centre the title in that empty space. The date would then go below the photos. (See last photo above.)
If there were potentially two photos to go onto a page, I would only choose one because I feel that a single photo is much more effective than two.
Where there were more than four photos, I would use a combination of the above layouts, except the title would go above the photo(s) on the first page, and the date would go below the photo(s) on the last page. (See photos below.)

I think that this is the sort of visual journal that anybody could undertake. You can start whenever you want. You can update it as frequently as you want (I did half a year’s worth in one go). You can adopt an even narrower criteria than I have and therefore include even less photos than me. You can add embellishments if you wish. You can easily add more text.

Do you keep a personal journal of sorts (or done so in the past)?

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02 July 2012

My first scrapbook reveal

So here is the first peek into my scrapbooks prior to Project Life; this particular one being Pete’s second year scrapbook.

Even though I’m planning to write a number of posts about my ‘framework’ for scrapbooking, I still want to give you a bit of context for this scrapbook. Basically, my approach for Angus, Pete and James has been to do:

a) a baby book (you know, the ones that record all the birth weight details, etc.)
b) a special first year scrapbook that records their entire first year
c) ongoing scrapbooks that records their subsequent years.

And so this scrapbook fits into the third category…

For the notebook, I chose a visual diary by Kikki-K because I liked the style and the paper quality/thickness was very decent. More importantly, the spiral was big enough to accommodate lots of photos being stuck inside the notebook, and the thick elastic meant the scrapbook would be held together really nicely. I had bought a set of three from the previous collection for Angus’ scrapbooks and so I purchased three of this one for Pete.

For the title page here, I simply used some letter stamps (also from Kikki-K) to spell out Peter’s name, doing my best to centre it on the page.

You’ll probably hear me saying this quite often: my approach to memory keeping is always to keep the aesthetic and content as simple as possible.

As you can see here, I’ve used no embellishments, a black felt tip pen for journalling and a simple thin, white border for the photos.

Each time I updated this scrapbook, this would be my process:

Using Aperture (the program I use to organise and manage all my photos), I select the photos I want to include in the scrapbook. I don’t really care whether or not the photos are great quality ones in terms of sharpness, colour or composition. (I save those for photo books, which I’ll talk about in future posts.) Instead, the photos I choose are simply ones that captured a moment I want to record for the future Pete.
I print the photos as contact sheets through the Aperture print functionality so that I can get miniature-sized photos. By using smaller photos, it means I can include more photos.
Before picking up my scissors, I number the photos chronologically on the back of the photo paper in case I (or some other little person) accidentally knock them out of order.
After the cutting up was done (probably my least favourite part of the entire process), I stick them down chronologically into the notebook. I fit about eight to a page, and usually adapt a ‘grid approach’ to the layout (as shown in the second of the two photos above). My primary concern is to leave enough space for writing dates, captions and journalling afterwards.
I always leave the left hand side pages empty and save them for showcasing the photos I want to highlight. If I really like a photo, I print it in a larger size and stick that in (see the first of the two photos above).
After sticking in all the photos, I go back and do all the captioning/journalling based on the photos that I have chosen. I include the date of the photo based on the photo’s metadata in Aperture. I am always happy to keep the text to a minimum, and to let the photos do the talking.
For all my captioning and journalling, I write in the first person, addressing the future Pete directly.

So there you have it! Angus’ 2nd year and 3 year scrapbooks have also been done this way, and I’ll be sharing them here over the coming weeks as well.

I’m so glad to be back from my bloggy break, and I look forward to catching up on all your blog posts. The time out was fantastic, as it allowed me to finish the magazine job (super yay) and also to work out the next step for my blog. I’m seriously excited and can’t wait to reveal more in the next month.

(Linking up with Jess for IBOT.)

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20 June 2012

Project Life, Weeks 20 & 21

Week 20 was just wonderful: lots of playtime with Pete and Jamie, a delicious beef stir fry from Rick, the sweetest pink sunset ever and a hugely successful ferry trip (see below). I just love that photo of Pete and Jamie in the bottom right corner: Rick had just turned on the vacuum and while Pete is covering his ears in horror, Jamie is completely unfazed. Makes me smile every time I see it; such a great reminder of the little individuals our boys are. (Remember you can click on each of the images for a larger version.)

The ferry trip was soooo much fun for all of us! As you can see, photos from the ferry outing took up most of the right hand page. As the photos themselves are quite busy, I deliberately kept it really simple with hardly any text save for the words “Ferry trip outing” in the circle in the first photo. Quite proud of myself that I managed to include me in there somewhere, which is a bit of rarity.

The last two photos at the bottom were again from Dee Why beach. I hadn’t intended on trying to create a panaromic view but it kind of just turned out that way. There’s something about that beach around sunset/dusk. There is just this magical glow about it. At least once a week, we try to pop down there briefly before dinnertime just to look out at the sky, the clouds, the horizon and the sea.

Ah yes, week 21 was the week of The Haircuts. That’s Jamie in the first photo, getting his hair shaven off by Rick in our backyard. I decided that this post I wrote about how I emotional I was at losing Jamie’s golden baby hair had to be included. To keep it simple, I simply formatted it into two columns of text using the same font as the text in the ‘this week’ card, and printed it out onto a white 6×4 photo card.

Also worth a mention was the delicious pork chop and spaghetti dish that Rick whipped up that week. My goodness, that pork was good. And that photo next to the pork is of Jamie walking straight into Angus’ arms during bedtime the very same evening they got their hair cut. It was the sweetest moment: I’m not sure who was most excited – Angus, Jamie or us!

To balance out all the family shots on the other side, the right hand page is filled with still shots that I took over the weekend. A lot of these were taking in my studio as I attempted to capture that perfect grey light. The ones of Pete and Angus hanging around in my studio are very precious to me because it’s not something that happens all that often – but that particular afternoon, they both decided to come upstairs after playing outside to see what mummy was doing.

Love the boys.

Love Rick.

Love Project Life.

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You can read my other Project Life posts here.

Materials used: Becky Higgins Design A page protector; Becky Higgins 6×12 page protector; Kodak 170gsm glossy photo paper. All photos printed on the Canon MP630 Pixma.

(Linking up with The Mom Creative and Grace for FYBF.)

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05 June 2012

Project Life, Weeks 18 & 19

In an attempt to catch up, I’m showing both Week 18 and Week 19 in this one post. Again, make sure you click on the images for a larger version and (slightly) more detail. I’ve only got about fifteen minutes before Angus arrives home from preschool, so this one is going to be short and sweet.

The image above is the left hand page of Week 18. I love the photos of Pete and Jamie painting together, and especially the one of Jamie sticking the paintbrush in his mouth. I think it’s so lovely that even with Angus at preschool, Jamie still has another older brother to play with and to lead the way! I also like that first photo, which was simply a snap of our dining table after a chaotic lunch of dumplings and BBQ pork buns that my parents had bought for us! Yum.

The right hand page for Week 18 looks a lot calmer, with photos of mum’s delicious soup, unsorted laundry, the gorgeous lake at Akuna Bay, an evening at home with Rick and a very cute photo of Jamie peeping at Rick through a hole at the Dee Why playground. It had been a slow sort of week, as I’d been quite crook with the cold.

Week 19 was the one when Jamie felt unwell, hence the dear little photo of him nestled on Nan’s shoulder, looking out at me with one eye open. I also love the photo of him at the window – makes him seem so small, and so innocent somehow. This was also the week of playing cubby house under the big dining table and experimenting with giving the boys showers instead of baths. No comment on how that went. Oh, and of course the photo of me looking like a lady.

The right hand page features primarily photos from our day off that week: we hung out at home in the afternoon and then made a quick trip down to Dee Why beach in the evening. There is also a special photo of the three boys with Rick’s parents, taken at Rick’s grandpa’s 98th birthday (I know, amazing, right?). Very minimal text – just a few captions here and there. I like to let the photos do the talking.

You can read my other Project Life posts here.

Materials used: Becky Higgins Design A page protector; Becky Higgins 6×12 page protector; Kodak 170gsm glossy photo paper. All photos printed on the Canon MP630 Pixma.

(Linking up with The Mom Creative and My Creative Space.)

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30 May 2012

Project Life, Week 17

I’ve now completed eight weeks of Project Life, and I’m still convinced it’s the best method of memory-keeping! However, seeing as I’m currently wrapping up some other scrapbooks and albums that I’ve been working on, I’m thinking about posting about them too. Would that be of interest to you? I thought it would help to give you an overall idea of how I’ve been approaching memory-keeping, seeing as Project Life might not be everybody’s cup of tea (though it definitely is mine!).

I’ve decided to make these Project Life posts slightly shorter, so that they don’t chew up too much of your time to read! This of course means less photos. However, if you click on the images below, you’ll be able to see a much larger version of it, which means more detail.

Anyway, the above shot is the left hand page of Week 17. I love all the everyday family life photos here: Rick and Angus playing tip in the family room, the boy enjoying their bath time, Rick bustling about in the kitchen, and the delicious chicken stir fry that Rick whips up almost every week.

The Wednesday of Week 17 was Anzac Day, the day on which one of our parishioners lost his battle to cancer. After visiting him in hospital that day, we drove on to Little Manly Cove, where we had lunch and the boys got to run on the sand for a bit. This photo was taken at the Cove, and I added a paragraph of text to commemorate the date and occasion (some of this is blurred for confidentiality). Even looking at it now makes me tear up.

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15 May 2012

Project Life, Week 16

Still loving Project Life! I’m getting slightly quicker at it every week, which is quite a relief because in the beginning, it can be feel quite overwhelming. I would like to be completely transparent and reveal now that my incentive for completing this blog post is a handful of Maltesers which I’m allowing myself to consume at the end of this. So let’s do this:

The left hand page for Week 16. It was a rainy sort of week, so we were indoors a lot hence quite a few snapshots of the boys doing their ‘thing.’ I just love the shots of Pete on our red retro phone. It’s disconnected but the boys love pretending to make calls on it. Here, Pete was on the phone with Nan. Also included on this page are some gorgeous garden flowers from one our parishioners (first photo above).

Still loving the typesetting for the introductory photo. This photo is of the boys looking through an old photo album filled with photos of Rick and myself before they were around. I had fun asking them “Where’s daddy?” and “Where’s mummy?” and they had fun getting all the answers right!

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01 May 2012

Project Life, Week 15

So I’ve been pretty slack with posting my weekly Project Life updates. But the good news is that I have actually kept up with my weekly spreads these last few weeks, and I’ve found that it doesn’t take all that long to do once you discover your rhythm and establish a workflow. I still can’t begin to express how excited I am about this new way of documenting our day to day lives (thank you Elise!). It’s simple. It’s flexible. It’s beautiful. And it’s enjoyable, and not guilt-driven.

This is left hand side of the spread for week 15. Lots of people shots, because the week was filled with spending time with people. I’m quite sure no one else will notice, but it bugs me that the top right photo is slightly butting out in this shot. Now you know. (How crazy I am.)

I decided to change the design for the first photo. The tiny arrow in the left hand corner just wasn’t working for me. I love this new look because it has instant impact, yet due to the transparency of the text, you can still see the entire photo. This shot of the boys is also one of my favourites for the year so far. One of those moments that I want to remember forever.

The ‘this week’ template is working beautifully. Just enough space to capture each week’s highlights without going into too much detail, allowing the photos to tell the stories. The shot of Pete in a bucket at Clareville Beach reflects so much of his character: spontaneous, fun, cheeky and completely unpredictable. He’s such a cutie and always his own little person.

This top shot of Rick and the boys was taken on Tuesday morning just before he was about to read the Big Picture Story Bible (best children’s bible ever) with them. The photo is special because it’s not that often that I have time to snap shots during the hectic morning rush. The guys are all doing their ‘thing’: Rick attempting to reply to an urgent email; Angus attempting to climb onto Rick; and Pete and Jamie attempting to climb out the window.

On Wednesday, Aunty Jess came to play! So some lovely shots of her with Pete and Jamie, with a small paragraph of text on the first photo.

On Thursday mornings, my parents usually come over for a few hours to spend some time with the boys. On this particular Thursday, we miraculously managed to get a few photos of them with the boys all smiling and looking in the direction of the camera. It was also our last time seeing them before they were due to leave for a 2 week holiday in Hong Kong, so I definitely had to include one of the photos in the spread. I love how the boys all have their blue bibs and their plastic IKEA plates. So Casa Mason.

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17 April 2012

Introducing Project Life

I am so excited to be sharing my very first Project Life spread with you! First up, I have to thank Elise because it was through her amazing blog that I found out about Project Life. In a nutshell, Project Life is a scrapbooking system developed by Becky Higgins that allows you to focus on the memory-keeping rather than being caught up in the stress of the scrapbooking process. I’ve spent so many years fantasising about the ultimate scrapbooking method, and seriously, this is it my friends. This is it.

One of the underlying premises of Project Life is that you capture one week in one spread. This is rather revolutionary for me, because it allows me the freedom of choosing the best moments of the week to capture, rather than feeling like I need to scrapbook every single one. More importantly, the flexibility of the Project Life system is pure genius. Pure genius.

Anyway, I’ll jump right into my first spread, and hopefully as the weeks go by, it’ll become clear to you how amazing this system is! Also, let me encourage you to do a Google image search for Project Life and you’ll see what I mean by how ridiculously flexible it is. (You can click on any of these images to enlarge them.)

This is the entire left hand page for week 14. I’ll go through ~~each~~ most of the sections separately to explain what I did. You need to decide before you begin whether your week begins on a Sunday or Monday. I chose Monday. Also, even though the idea is that there are NO RULES and you can do whatever you want for each week, I have to admit I spent a bit of time working out what I thought my ‘style’ would be, and how I was likely to scrapbook each week. A lot of this depends on what materials you have and how you like to capture memories. In doing my first spread, I learnt that I was more naturally a ‘digital’ scrapbooker rather than a traditional scrapbooker (mainly because I can’t stand my own handwriting). (Sad, but true.).

I decided to put my favourite shot of the week – aka the ‘hero shot’ – as the very first image. This happened to be a photo that I took of all three boys on the Thursday morning, while they were all standing at the front window watching the cars go by. No words needed to explain this shot. Just one of those everyday moments that capture in itself what life with the boys looks like right now. I added the photo’s date to the bottom left hand corner, and you will see that I’ve done this with every other photo as well.

You’ll notice if you look at photos of other people’s Project Life albums, this first photo of the spread is usually the one that intros the week, and almost always has the first and last dates of that particular week on it. I like the way Elise has a Kraft circle dot and the two dates stamped on two lines, but I didn’t think that it would tie in way with the rest of my digital design (I also had some inexplicable difficulty with working my stamp – most likely just lack of co-ordination of my part, but let’s not dwell on that for the purposes of this post.) So I settled on this beige arrow with white text on top – which is admittedly okay but not fantastic. For now, it’s fine, and the best thing about this system is that if I decide to change it down the track, I can always just re-print the photo and re-insert it! Awesome, right?

I took this photo at Dee Why beach on the Thursday evening, on my way back to the car from the cafe having picked up a couple of coffees for Rick and myself. It was just beautiful. I decided to just typeset the words ‘Dusk at Dee Why’ in Rockwell font over the photo. I foresee a lot of these ‘Dusk at Dee Why’ shots throughout the album.

Below the two landscape 4×6 pockets are four portrait 3×4 pockets. In this first pocket is a brief overview of the week, including special highlights (like Jamie starting to cruise!) and events. I designed the card in Adobe InDesign (which is also what I use to add text and arrows and other design elements to all the photos) and will be re-using the template for future weeks. The photo to the right is one of Pete and Jamie at lunchtime on Tuesday, eating cheese. We like our cheese here at Casa Mason.

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