Everything we do at Simple Scrapper is about helping you find ways to scrapbook that feel good and are sustainable. That looks like troubleshooting your storytelling sticking-points and laying out the options when you’re craving consistency.
In this third and final episode of our special Q&A series I’m answering more submitted questions, including some that were specifically about me and my scrapbooking hobby.
Links Mentioned
- My 2017 December Daily album
- Project 365
- #Thursday3
- Project Life
- Stop the Blur
- Monthly Roundup
- Aligned year-long class
- The “Pick Three”
- Document a photo from now
- Tell a Bucket List Story
- Create a page inspired by a class or challenge
- Simple Scrapper membership community
- Submit a question for the podcast
[00:00:00] Jennifer Wilson: How do you choose projects with more intention? Am I caught up with my own scrapbooking right now? We're covering these juicy topics and more in this episode.
[00:00:11] Welcome to Scrapbook Your Way, the show that explores the breadth of ways to be at memory keeper today. I'm your host, Jennifer Wilson, owner of Simple Scrapper and author of The New Rules of Scrapbooking.
[00:00:22] This is episode 277. In this episode, I'm answering listener questions about storytelling strategies, recurring projects, and my own scrapbooking experience. This is the final episode in a three-part series released in September 2024.
[00:00:42] Hello friends. We are here at our final Q and A episode for this special series. This has been both hard and incredibly rewarding. I've loved having the chance to share more of my own perspectives and ideas and solutions with you in these conversations. And so I'm really trying to think about this last one, because there are some more personal questions, as this casual, sit down with a friend.
[00:01:16] I have my iced coffee here. You can hear it there, hopefully. And I want to just have some fun and share even more than we already have in the previous two episodes.
[00:01:32] So for starters, of course, I wanted to share one more thing that I am excited about. And that is this year's December Daily project. So, if you are completely new to the community, December Daily is a project started by Ali Edwards and for the past decade plus she has released products in coordination with that. And so I am particularly excited about my approach this year to keep it more simple than complicated. Now one might think that's normally my approach, but actually for the past few years, I've really enjoyed experimenting, doing more interactive, complicated pages that require a lot of measuring and planning and prep. But that's also led to some things being more unfinished than I would like. And so we're going to talk a little bit more in this episode about where I am at in my own hobby. But this year, I'm excited about focusing on what I know really works for me when it comes to December Daily. And I immediately think back to my 2017 album, which was finished very quickly after December. And that was a six by eight project.
[00:02:57] And I will link the blog post where I talk about this. And it focused more on the pocket pages. A very straightforward approach. Of course there were beautiful, fun things. This is a fun scrapbook project.
[00:03:14] But I really want to focus on moving forward with more speed and efficiency. Um, enjoying the process and enjoying that the process is seeing progress. This year, I only purchased the main kit, a six by eight album, and two embellishment ad-ons. The six by eight transparencies and the six by eight die cut pages . The combination of these gives me just what I need and not too much extra so I can reduce decision fatigue. And know that my project is more finishable. And as I said, we will get more into projects and me going forward. But as of right now in September of 2024, I'm looking forward to the holiday season. My daughter is started to get really into decorating.
[00:04:09] So we're starting with our fall decorating and she's definitely wanted to be part of the process. And so that gets me more excited about the holiday season as well. So I will be sharing some of that as we go forward, of course. But that's one of, one more thing that I'm excited about in my own hobby.
[00:04:29] All right now, we're going to dive in to some more questions. And I actually had one that came up recently inside of our community. So for part of our Refresh Retreat this weekend, I shared a prompt to document a personal passion.
[00:04:52] And one of our members, Nicole shared that she struggled with this concept. That documenting a passion or a personal story in contrast to an event based layout is out of her comfort zone. And she says, "I'm not sure why on the surface, it feels selfish to waste a page solely on myself." And then she says, "when she says it out loud, it sounds kind of ridiculous, but that it does resonate."
[00:05:17] That is how she feels. So it's okay to feel that way; your feelings are valid. And I wanted to offer her a way to experiment with steps towards this concept without moving too far out of her comfort zone. And so again, we're talking about telling a story about a passion that you have. And so I suggested to her, could you create a bridge to this concept with a story about sharing a passion with someone else? So the examples I offered were maybe you and a friend love your pumpkin spice lattes every fall.
[00:05:57] So you always make that a special date. Or maybe you introduced your personal passion for scary movies to your partner. Or maybe you hope that your child has the same passion that you do for reading. And so within a matter of, you know, not too long, Nicole replied and said that she liked this idea. And that sharing a passion and talking about what that means in context of a friendship is much more appealing.
[00:06:24] I wanted to include this particular question as part of our final Q and A episode, because I know that Nicole is not alone in her feelings. I know that there are others who find it challenging to pull more of their personal stories and their self out of their heads and hearts and onto the page. And anything that you can do to just take small steps will make it easier going forward.
[00:06:54] All right. So now we have two really good questions about projects from Jo and from Kaethe. So Jo writes, "what sorts of recurring scrapbook projects do people scrap?" For example, she knows that there's nine photos on the ninth, a monthly wrap-up, Thursday selfies. And she can't think of the names of any others. So she wants to have a collection of all the ideas that are out there that are that as a whole the scrapbooking community is participating in, so she has her buffet of options.
[00:07:26] So I started to jot down the ones that came to my mind, and I would love to hear of any others that maybe I missed, but I think this does cover the range of scales that are often featured in recurring projects.
[00:07:40] So the first one is Project 365 or a photo a day project. Where you're really thinking on that daily basis to capture something. Doing a one second a day video also maybe fits into this category as well, where the idea is to represent a small snippet of each day of the year. Even if you have to fudge a little bit of it and grab images from different days to fill in the gaps. But the idea is 365 slices of life from your year.
[00:08:15] #Thursday3 is a weekly selfie project hosted by Kristin Tweedale on Instagram. And it invites you to share a current selfie of yourself as well as three things that are real in your life right now. And many scrapbookers have taken to using this as a foundation for part of their memory keeping. They do specific projects around it or just incorporate those selfies into their other projects.
[00:08:41] Nine on the ninth or 12 on the 12th or whatever numbers you want to use is often a prompt to take a specific number of photos on a specific day of the month. And do that every month of the year. This can be kind of like a day in the life type of project, a way to just focus that intensity of everyday life photography over just a single day. Instead of doing it every single day of the month, like in a Project 365.
[00:09:13] We've also seen projects that are maybe like Project 24 for the year.
[00:09:18] These are a little bit more like bucket list projects, not in terms of stories, but of just things that you want to do. They could be things that you want to do inside of your hobby or just things that you want to do in life. They can be more specific. They can be more abstract. They can also relate to the number of types of a certain thing that you want to do in scrapbooking.
[00:09:41] So for example, Project 24 could be that you want to make 24 layouts about a certain subject or towards a certain goal. There's lots of different variations on that.
[00:09:52] Now Project Life is probably one of the biggest that we'll mention here. This is a concept created by Becky Higgins and typically it is completed in a pocket page format, either physical or digital and represents either a single week at a time or a month at a time.
[00:10:14] Similarly Stop the Blur is Heidi Swapp's iteration on this using a smaller 7x9 notebook. It's kind of another way to think about documenting all the little bits of everyday life that to capture an entire year or on an ongoing basis. Both of those are incredible projects.
[00:10:40] I've seen that those who complete them feel so incredibly rewarded and satisfied by it. But I also see a lot of people have trouble completing those because of the volume that's required to keep up the consistency. It's very easy to feel behind, particularly if you're doing on a weekly versus a monthly basis. I've seen a lot of folks stall out on this.
[00:11:08] So it doesn't mean that it's not a great project. I think you just have to decide on whether or not it's a priority for you, it's something that you can commit to and it fits your personality.
[00:11:17] There's also been a number of different types of monthly roundups over the years, prompts shared, just maybe a summary that you create. Can we be more focused on the journaling and the storytelling of what's going on for you that maybe didn't get captured in the photos? Or it could be a collage and more focused on "here are the highlights from a single month," and this could be represented as a layout, a spread, a blog post depending on what format that you want to choose. Now I also wanted to include The 100 Day Project in here. This is where you choose something of varying scales to do for 100 days. It could be a hundred doodles or a hundred layouts or a hundred drawers decluttered. People choose such a wide variety of things for a 100 Day Project, but it is a popular one among scrapbookers and crafters and artists.
[00:12:14] So Jo asks about recurring projects. And so these don't necessarily have to be things that are consistent between days, weeks, and months. It could be things that are you do annually, and I've seen a number of folks do an annual page for say the first or last day of school for their children, interviews on birthdays, but they have something that they do on a recurring basis once a year or more per year to capture a slice of life or a part of a certain story in a consistent way over time.
[00:12:47] Now in my intro about what's exciting me, we talked a little bit about December Daily.
[00:12:53] That's an annual project that Ali Edwards hosts, but she also has projects like One Little Word, which is an ongoing project throughout a single year, and then Week in the Life, which is a documentation week followed by doing whatever kind of project you might want to do related to that. It could be as simple as taking the photos and as complicated as an entire album. Those tend to be projects that folks who enjoy them want to do year after year and it becomes part of their routine in the hobby. There's also projects like October Daily, November Gratitude type of projects.
[00:13:32] This time, at the end of the year, tends to invite more cozy nostalgic feelings, and we get really excited about the products and the possibilities of those products. We also do have to remember that we may have other projects already in flight that we want to use that time to complete. That's kind of a message that I'm always sharing inside of our community.
[00:13:58] That as much as we would love to do everything, we can't. And sometimes we have to celebrate the beautiful things that others are creating and recognize that it's not a good choice for us in this season of life.
[00:14:13] So Kaethe's question is related and I'll explain why here. So she asks, "what other ideas do you have for year long classes?" She says "Aligned has been crucial to keeping my hand in during this hectic year and options for future years are welcome."
[00:14:30] And so first off, I will say that Aligned is a project that is an invitation to use the natural seasons as a lens for your life and feeling further connected that to the present moment. And I've chosen a very simple, reactive... I'm doing this prompt based on what I'm called to in the moment, a little bit more art journaling style. Sometimes not so creative, sometimes just photos and words. But it's all in one single album. And then my collaborator on this Helen is doing four seasonal mini books that really document life. And her approach to this is a variation on Project Life or Stop the Blur where she is capturing the memories of her year in this seasonal context. I love that the prompts that we've developed can work for either direction and anything in between.
[00:15:39] The Aligned classroom will be staying in the community and you can reset it and start over for a new year if you'd like to go through the prompts again. Or of course, if you're starting for the first time, you can jump in at any seasonal shift.
[00:15:53] We are just starting the fall season with 13 more weeks and then that class will officially be completed. But as I mentioned, it will stay in the community for the foreseeable future. As an instructor year long classes are very challenging, and so you will typically find that I do them every other year. Because a year later, I forget how challenging they are. At this point, I don't have anything specifically planned for next year. I'm always open to new suggestions. But I wanted to share another example from inside the community, as well as some questions to ask yourself. Number one is our Bucket List Bootcamp class.
[00:16:42] This was originally taught as a year long class. And there are prompts to tell some of these more introspective stories for one to three layouts a month. So there's 36 total prompts. And I have more thorough examples and templates for 12 of them. And then we have 24 additional examples from our creative team.
[00:17:03] This is something that you certainly could take on as a year long type of thing. Also a number of the projects we already discussed, like Project 365, Project Life, One Little Word.. These are things that may or may not have your long classes associated with them. One Little Word definitely does. But they are year long projects that can help you stay connected to your hobby and everything else. I know that the year that I kept up with my Project Life photo book, I was the most on top of my photo management that I had ever been. And consequently ended up creating way more layouts than I would have otherwise because my photo management was so caught up. So year long projects can be amazing for just keeping you in the groove and they have that snowball effect.
[00:17:55] But I have some specific questions that I want to reflect back to Kaethe and anyone else who may be curious about year long classes. And the first one is "what made Aligned work so well for you?" And in my opinion, it was because there was flexibility and the ability to do it in a relatively simple and easy and fast way. If you wanted to do something more complicated, and I've made a couple of layouts from it, you can, but you can still feel caught up without a lot of effort. And so that is an important lens for looking at year long activities. How much time is it going to take for you to complete each one? And how quickly could you feel behind on that?
[00:18:49] With Aligned it feels very doable to catch up even if you miss a week or two.
[00:18:55] And so the follow-up to that is what kind of project could maybe you design that is just as simple, that feels as doable. So something that came to mind for me, something that I would call like a Pick Three. Because there's what maybe four to five weeks in a given month. And we know that we may not have time to do something every single week. But if we could have these three things that we want to accomplish every single month as a baseline that provides a great starting point. So one would be documenting a photo from now and using this as an incentive to maintain your photo library. One would be a bucket list story. So you're digging into your list of stories you want to get to. And then finally, the third item could be a page that's inspired by a class or a challenge. This helps you feel like you're using your purchases well and staying connected to the community.
[00:19:53] All right. I hope that was helpful as you are starting to think about what you might want to tackle in the new year.
[00:20:04] So speaking of community, Bre offered another question. "What can we do to make the community more welcoming to newcomers?" And of course, she's talking specifically about our Simple Scrapper membership community. But I think my answers here apply for any community on any subject that you are a part of. The first one is to look for unanswered questions. Those who host communities do their best to try to make sure that every question gets answered and people are taken care of, but sometimes things just fall down that feed so quickly that we're not able to see them. And there can be things that are unanswered.
[00:20:46] And we want to make sure that if particularly a newcomer takes the time to ask a question that they get some sort of response, whether it's just a personal anecdote or a referral to the official answer for it.
[00:21:00] My second point is to be mindful of jargon and acronyms. And these could be things that are specific to our hobby, specific to brands or manufacturers, or even specific to the community. So, for example, in scrapbooking, we have a term called scrap lift, which means using someone else's layout as inspiration, whether it could be very direct or even just loose inspiration. We may use acronyms like AE for Ali Edwards. Or PL for Project Life. And then even inside of the Simple Scrapper community, we talk about our Creative Hub and our Journey Plans.
[00:21:45] And so anytime you're part of a community, there's going to be a language that's shared by community members. And so making sure that newcomers know what you're talking about is something that anyone can do to make them feel more welcomed.
[00:22:00] And then finally you can let the community host know if something is confusing to you. Or you've perceived it or heard that it is confusing to someone else. Often we don't know unless somebody says something. We do our best to make sure that information is presented succinctly and is easy to find and that everything works. But things do slip through the cracks and sometimes maybe a word gets left out and that changes the meaning of something.
[00:22:31] So don't ever hesitate to let a creator know that there might be an issue or you're just not sure, because I can tell you, they want to know how they can improve and make sure that their instruction, their guidance, their example makes more sense to everyone. All right.
[00:22:52] Thanks, Bre. Okay. It looks like Bre asked another question here and Jen echoed it. So she says, "I'm also wondering what happened to your curly hair journey." So you'll see on Instagram. And I think a lot of my photos this year have still had curly hair. But I am not styling it naturally curly as much as I did in the past four years combined. So to catch you up on the backstory here.
[00:23:20] When the pandemic hit. I just decided, okay, now is the time I want to see if I can style my hair naturally wavy curly. Um, I believe I have type three C hair. It can be quite curly with a lot of encouragement, but it can also be quite loose with more humidity and time. And so I went through the process.
[00:23:51] I practiced, I watched the videos, I learned all these different techniques. I bought 1,000,001 different products and learned all the things that worked best for me. And of course over the pandemic, my hair just kept getting longer and longer and longer. I didn't have a haircut for three years, at least I think. And there was a certain point where my hair was getting less curly because it was so weighed down.
[00:24:18] Now I don't have particularly heavy hair to start with. But at that length, I just couldn't maintain the curl and things were getting frustrating because of the length getting caught in seatbelts and behind chairs. And for those of you who have maintained very long hair for a long time, I envy you. I started to find it kind of suffocating and frustrating. And then it was also taking forever to dry.
[00:24:48] I was doing partial diffusing and partial air drying. And the longer my hair got the more difficult it was to ever get it dry. And so in January of 2023, I chopped it off myself. And with the intention that I would go get a real cut, uh, very soon after.
[00:25:10] I enjoyed having it shorter. It was definitely lighter, if you will, in lots of different ways. But there were a couple challenges to it. Even though I could style it still very well and actually much quicker, because I couldn't protect it as well overnight, I was not getting day two day three hair where my hair still looked pretty nice. And that was a really big frustration.
[00:25:40] So I started adding back in more heat tools including both the curling iron and the flat iron. And then another challenge that I had was that once I had that big haircut, all of my hair was totally virgin, if you will. There was very little damage to it. And when I started this, I had very high porosity hair that that dried quickly. And even at the short length, my hair was taking forever to dry. And actually in the three haircuts I've had in the past year my hairdresser can't get it dry in the time it takes for our appointment. And she was styling it in a more wavy curly manner with the diffuser.
[00:26:32] And so that just led me to some blow drying, some air drying, but then if I air dried, I would then use a curling iron or a flat iron the next day.
[00:26:43] All this to say, I am kind of in the middle place where I want my hair just a tiny bit longer. So that I can protect it a little bit more if I do choose to style it curly. But I also do enjoy the flexibility of blow drying it and using heat tools. And so at this point, I'm kind of just doing a combination depending on what I feel like and depending on how much time that I have.
[00:27:12] Alright, thanks Bre and Jen for being curious.
[00:27:15] All right now we have perhaps the hard questions.
[00:27:19] So Lea asks. "Do you feel like you were aware you want to be with your personal scrapbooking? Being caught up isn't really a thing, but I'm interested to hear, if you feel good about where you are with your personal stories."
[00:27:33] Then Amy adds on to that: "I'd like to hear what your focuses have been this year and your personal scrapbooking. Have you done any daily life scrapbooking, bucket list stories, travel projects?" She is just curious.
[00:27:45] So, this is where I say that I feel like a poser maybe. I have intentionally built the business around weathering ebbs and flows in my time, energy and motivation, my own mental health journey, where I'm at, what interests me. And so while I am very connected to scrapbooking on an everyday basis. I am currently not doing it as much as I would like to, for a number of reasons.
[00:28:18] And so am I where I want to be with my hobby? No, and I'm not sure most of us are. Because at the same time, do I feel good about where I'm at? Yeah, I do. I have so many stories that have been told. Whenever I flip through my albums, I feel grateful for everything that I've contributed to my story as a whole. Every time I dig into either projects or my organization system, either here in my office or elsewhere in my house, I realize how much progress I've made already.
[00:28:55] And so I'm definitely at this place of, yes, there's things that I would like to have already completed. But I don't feel bad about it. And I don't ever want to feel bad about it. Because I'm doing this as a choice. This is something that I want to contribute to my own life experience and my legacy.
[00:29:21] And so Amy asked what my focuses have been this year.
[00:29:24] And I jokingly noted this for myself: starting and not finishing projects. So at the end of last year, I had so many really great podcast interviews that were about projects that I really wanted to focus on that this year. And while I've made progress. I haven't finished any of them yet. There's always something else that starting, something else I need to draw my attention to. I've done the most on a mini album for a trip we took early in the summer. That I'm sure we'll be the first one finished as well, but there's other projects that I have started to various degrees or even not started.
[00:30:06] One of those also is a photo book for this year that's in a Project Life style that I'm doing inside of Lightroom Classic. I set this up at the beginning of the year and I made a few pages. But I recently decided to kind of course correct my structure to make it easier to finish the project. I'm actually just doing one single page per week with a very consistent kind of 12 by 12 grid format with three, four by sixes and six, three by fours.
[00:30:43] And so I'm going to give that some attention over the next month or so, and see if I can really develop some momentum on finishing it, but I'm also willing to let it go if I get swept away into something else.
[00:30:58] Big picture here. I know, and I knew this last year when I made this choice, I know I do well with individual layouts, as mini projects. But I've had a hard time giving up the allure of bigger projects, of albums of varying sizes, of things that you do over time or things that are more time-bound. They're fun to conceptualize to gather the items for, you can see them as complete things. But I don't always have the momentum to see it through. And I need to honor that within my own behavior.
[00:31:34] So Carol asks a follow up question as well and asked about my scrapbooking goals overall. She says that I've mentioned that I'm a slow scrapbooker. So is my intent to capture the stories you want to tell most, but not worry about any kind of annual projects? And am I working on a scrapbook for Emily about her life, but prior to high school graduation?
[00:31:54] My focus is more on contributing stories to my library of memories than it is on annual projects. If I can do them and I finish them, that's great. But that is not my big picture goal. I do have larger projects related to family history and even things that I want to do for Emily and my stepsons. But those don't always fall to the top of the excitement list.
[00:32:22] It comes back to, if I can just tell stories, with layouts of varying sizes, I can feel really productive and fulfilled in this hobby. And I need to always remind myself of that.
[00:32:37] Then her final part of the question about doing kind of a school years type album for Emily. I have not started anything like that. But what I am doing is continually trying to improve both my photo management and my documentation process, so that doing some type of project of that nature in the future will be easier. To be honest, I can't see myself liking a design direction that I've chosen now in another five years. I can see myself focusing on that type of project her senior year as a distraction. And so I just want to set myself up well for it through my practices and my maintenance.
[00:33:21] All right, I feel like I need a nap now from all of those confessions. But I also feel reassured that I know that I am not alone. There's so many of you out there who resonate with my perspectives and sometimes kind of conflicting values and desires that we have inside of this hobby.
[00:33:44] And so I want to end with a question that Tina added to our question log. And so she talks about the planning that we do every single month inside of the community. And every time we revisit it She feels like she is moving forward, but maybe with a different direction or a different focus. She says "in most cases, I'm okay with it, but what does it say that I never stick to the plan? Is it worth trying to do planning so specifically and discretely?"
[00:34:23] So first off, I want to say to Tina and to everyone else. What it means is that you are human, that you are you who only you can be uniquely you. You're also not alone. I know that Peggy has mentioned that she also feels more comfortable and confident in shorter range planning. You know, we are not planning for a Fortune 500 company here we're planning for our scrapbooking, our hobby, our personal time, our self care, our free time, our leisure. And so there's no reason you have to plan at that larger scale of even two months, a quarter. A year. And I also want to share that there's contrast to that. You know, Kaethe mentioned earlier that she really liked having an annual project to keep her connected. And having that on the plan was helpful to her. And so there's no kind of perfect place to be on the spectrum from no structure to fully structured.
[00:35:18] And where you fall on that may change over time.
[00:35:23] But, in my opinion, this means that you might need to be okay with just planning one month at a time. Not assigning too many things in advance, but just maintaining a list of options. And using our inquiry process of understanding your context and what's exciting to you right now, and how much time and energy and motivation do you actually have... using that to make good decisions month to month so that you can set forward simple, specific objectives and accomplish them.
[00:35:58] And so with that, I will conclude by sharing that our Planning Party is coming up in November very soon.
[00:36:03] We'll be announcing dates and registration for this annual event. And that's where we will help you better understand what you need, like Tina, to be successful in the new year. You'll understand what's working well for you and what's not.
[00:36:21] The Planning Party is not necessarily about planning everything in advance, but gathering data, so that you have it in hand, so that you've thought about your own experience and experiences that you'd like to have, so that you can plan in an informed and intentional way once 2025 comes around.
[00:36:45] Alright. I hope these episodes were helpful. Thank you for sharing your questions. And I look forward to receiving more in the future. I do have that link in the show notes where you can submit questions for our upcoming Planning Creative Journey. These are questions about the functionality of specific planners, how you plan your scrapbooking hobby, how you make sure that you preserve time for your self-care, for your hobbies, anything planning or planning adjacent goes with these questions.
[00:37:16] And I can't wait to hear from our Scrapbook Your Way listeners. And of course, as always, please remember that you have permission to Scrapbook Your Way.
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Great episode. Besides what you’ve shared here, Is there a list somewhere of ALL the different types of ideas for scrapbooking themes and challenges that are out there? Or could we create one in the My Simple Scrapper community?