IMP Blog Team Melinda Staley | Week 4 – Keeping Things Interesting

Melinda here on the blog for the last blog post of the In My Pocket Collab class. How do you come up with pages when you are tired of doing the same thing over and over? Give yourself permission to mix it up on occasion –go where the tangents take you and embrace them when you need to. Highlighting this concept are my first pages this week. They were inspired by Meg Gundlach’s week 3 challenge prompt on recording the “Here and Now.” While her example focused on the 5 senses, my thoughts turned to the simple phrase “Here Again” and the things I do daily and weekly.

Syncopation Design’s On The Mend was perfect for recording my weekly trip to the allergist office for an allergy shot. You know you go to a place a lot when they know you by sight (even with a mask on) when you walk in the door. I knew I wanted the “Headache Game” card to be front and center on my page as it is one I can relate to oh so well at this point. I added the Here Again wordart and some select elements from Sahlin Studio’s Ouch to bolster the medical theme and made some day of the week word strips for the top corner card. I used a marker brush in pink to mark off the body parts that often give me trouble due to my allergies. To give myself more journaling space to write about the ongoing medical appointments, I copied the lines from the right side of the 6×4 card and stretched them to fit the square card shape. I dressed up my new plain white lined card with the purple flower doodles, which I changed to pink to match.

My second “here again”page focuses on the daily walks with our dog around the neighborhood. I used another Pocket Art Template by Rachel Jefferies and green and tan pieces to emphasize the outdoors from the IMP Collab Kit and The Practical Scrapper coordinating Everyday Life Kit for this page. The repetition of the clock die cut helps emphasize the 3 times a day I do this task. I used fonts to create my own custom title and personal the cards. A layer style by Mommyish turns larger letters into my own digital version of chipboard sticker letters, and I never run out of the popular characters.

My second set of pages is a mix of miscellaneous photos from the middle to end of January. Making a page or two with random photos is an easy way to keep things moving if there aren’t strong events or themes to scrap. Pictures are my greatest memory prompt, but I have learned that I don’t remember nearly as much as I think I will. It is a rare day now that I don’t take at least one picture of something – the food I ate, what I’m reading or working on, a cute pose of one of the animals, the wild things in the yard, etc. I take screenshots of conversations in my various messages apps. I save things from the family SnapChat group. I “write” things down in a notepad app on my phone and computer, and even sometimes on paper too. Since I scrap digitally, if there is a piece of memorabilia that I think might be included on a page, I photograph it. I might keep the physical thing too, but a lot of the time the photos are enough. Along with all of the digital photos and keepsakes, don’t forget to have a strong backup plan for them in case of computer issues!

I used the Pocket Art 9 template by Rachel Jefferies for these pages. The torn paper edge, stamps, paints and ephemera that came on the template coordinated with the IMP Collab Kit nicely, so I just rearranged things as needed to fit around my photos. I edited the cloud quote card so that it would work with the larger cluster of elements in the bottom corner by copying the word strips and putting them on a new layer that could be moved. As I couldn’t easily remove the quote strips still on the card I used the old paper scrapping trick of just covering it up with a sticker!

The Pocket Art templates come in both the 12×12 and 9×12 sizes. I didn’t have quite enough photos not related to my birthday to fill up two full pages, so I used the 9×12 template for page 2 and just left the far right side of the page “empty” to fill with a large strip of patterned paper and element clusters. I always love a good space to be artsy in. A stamp included with the template was an easy touch to that side of the page that still leaves lots of breathing room there too.

I definitely think I will be taking a ‘mix it up’ approach this year as I scrap this year’s day to day. I will add in pages in other styles as I do them – I have pages on the snow storms we had in January and the restaurant we went to for my birthday done that are fairly different in style. If needed, I will use photo prompt suggestions from some of the designers I follow that are sharing them to get ideas – in that vein, don’t forget past years lists are perfectly valid and a bit easier to find with a google search, ideas don’t have time limits! –I have some other pretty large scrapping goals for this year and so my main goal for this album is to keep working on this bi-weekly, as steady progress gets you to the finish line. At the same time, it should always be enjoyable.

Full credits for these pages, and all of my pages during the IMP Collab Life Stories Class can be found on my IMP Life Stories Pinterest Board.