IMP Blog Team Jill Kane | Difficult Appointments

IMP Blog Team Jill Kane | Difficult Appointments 1

Hi friends! When I saw Syncopation Design’s On The Mend Bundle, I thought, “Now there’s a universal kit. All living things have a story of not being well.” I decided to tell the story of taking my Dad to a doctor’s appointment one week after my Mom died. This is my first time that I’ve written about this experience. In addition to my design process, I have a few thoughts about documenting grief.

Let space be your helper. The reality is that appointment was a sad couple of hours for me, on top of all that occurred earlier in the month. I wanted to get some memories of that visit down before more time passes by. While developing my page structure, I told myself that I only need enough words to fill out the lined portion of the card. That’s it for right now.

Again, I knew the 3×4 card design wouldn’t provide me with enough writing space, so I took it up to 6×8. I decided to omit the lines to gain even more room. Jennifer created these with a fresh blue and green palette, but I also knew that I wanted to use some physical accents that are pink, coral and orange. Using the duotone function in Canva makes changing colors super easy. In fact, I didn’t have to hunt for colors to use on the appointment or icon cards. The duotone menu just shows a variety of colors and I selected one.

IMP Blog Team Jill Kane | Difficult Appointments 2

I also applied the same duotone preset to the face emoji card. That changed the black accents to dark grey, so I used that color for the added text. As I’ve looked through Canva’s elements library, I’ve spotted some painterly stamps and a variety of drawn circles. I added the heart, paint swoosh and pencil circle.

IMP Blog Team Jill Kane | Difficult Appointments 3

Once printed, I stapled on some vellum hearts from an Ali Edwards Story Kit on the icons card and filled the remaining 3×4 pockets with Ali sentiment cards. This was a no-photo event with my Dad. It’s great to have new and old papers to fill the pockets on this story.

The time feels right for me to begin telling some stories about this sad time in 2018, the cascade of change that followed and living with grief. Thanks for being a part of my process. Grief never leaves us, but the container we carry it in changes over time. See you next month! – Jill