Yesterday & Today

I'm taking another Big Picture Scrapbooking class...shocking, I know. This one is taught by Ali Edwards who is another one of my scrapbooking inspirations. The last couple of classes that I've taken have been very journaling-centric. I don't actually have any journaling phobia, but these recent classes have given me lots of ideas for topics to write about.

This weekend I did an exercise where I hauled out my old albums to figure out what things I like and what things I would do differently. I hadn't looked through my books in quite a while (we're talking years). So it was a lot of fun to flip back through them. One pleasant surprise was that for the most part I was okay with the layouts. In fact, there were actually lots of things that I liked. One of my favorite techniques is when I scan some object and then cut it out. (Why can I not think of what that's called when you cut something out like that? It's driving me nuts!) I love titles with puns but it was apparent that sometimes I try a little too hard to get a punny title. I definitely do not like overly contrived titles. I love big chunky letters and I love letters that overlay the photos (back in the day I used vellum to do that). I love enlargements. I love pages where I actually put some effort to journal. The most consistent thing that jumped out at me was that I like to keep my designs simple. I'm not a fan of the CM style of embellishments, from back in the day. Nothing made me cringe more than pages where I'd tried to use stickers. Sometimes I can make stickers work but for the most part, that's just not my thing.

Today I worked on three pages. I'm hoping to do the next lesson tonight, and maybe even get to the layout that goes with it. In the meantime, Ali Edward's provided a link to this site which has this great list of questions. Hopefully they will get *your* journaling mojo flowing.