Using your Scrapbook as a Journal

I found a great book about journaling as part of your scrapbooking experience a while ago. Now, this made a lot of sense to me, because I'd watched my mother write travel journal after travel journal. However, she then simply sticks them in the front of her albums and adds all the pictures behind the travel journal. I never liked that style of journaling, because it created such a divorce between text and pictures. Up until I saw the book on incorporating journaling into your scrapbooks, I scrapbooked mostly by using pictures and adding captions. But over time, I noticed that so many of the stories associated with the pictures got lost.

My usual method of journaling involves writing out the whole story in one long block of text (if I'm doing it on the computer) or writing a rough draft (if I'm going to be journaling by hand). Then I break that block of text down into smaller segments so as not to overwhelm any one page with a massive amount of text and add pictures as I go.

The page on the top left is done using a computer and printing out the text on one page with plenty of space in between the blocks for a nice edge finish. It is from a set of pages about my in-laws visiting us in DC. I broke the journal down into the separate days, and at the beginning of each "day" I put in my block of text. All of the text throughout is on the same color paper, to bind the story together, but that's certainly not a requirement. I find that journaling in this way helps me with my captioning, because I can refer back to a phrase in the text without having to worry about people being able to figure out the greater context of the picture.

The page on the right is from a trip I took to Boundary Waters in Minnesota. The trip leaders had us write about our experience while we there and sent us what we had written a few months later. I actually wrote out the whole story on cardstock and used it in place of regular journaling, since it captured exactly what was in my mind at the time of the trip. Again, I broke the text down into smaller chunks, and added one of the blocks of text every few pages. I also added the little notes that we wrote to each other at the end of the trip as an added reminder of the my adventure.

The actual text I had written during the trip, I added to the very back page of the scrapbook, using the letter I had received from my trip leaders as a sort of "envelope." To do this, I glued down both sides and across the bottom of the letter, and then about halfway down the page I added another line of glue to create a pocket for my pages.

This same method can be applied by keeping a travel journal and then using what you wrote during the trip as part of your scrapbooking layout.