Episode 73: Scrapbooking Yourself 10/10: Foundational Stories

Welcome to the Scrap Happier podcast, where we share quick tips, tricks, and techniques to help you create scrapbooks you love and be happier while doing it. I’m your host, Alice Boll.

Are you excited? It is time for part 10 of the 10 part series about scrapbooking yourself. We’ve talked about the important stuff that really matters, your influences, personality, your preferences, values and beliefs, accomplishments, scrapbooking photos of you, telling your childhood stories, documenting a season of life.

And for this final episode, we’re going to talk about your foundational stories. Are you ready? I saved a good one for last. Right off the top, I just want to remind you that you can find the show notes for this episode at scraphappy. org slash episode 7 3. Now if you want to take a peek at any of the layouts that I talk about during this episode, you know where to find them.

The way I think about foundational stories is that these are the ones that come up for you again and again in your life. They’re the ones that when you get together with your family or with your friends, you just can’t help but tell these stories again. Maybe it’s a story about how when you were a child, you looked like a boy because your hair just wouldn’t grow long.

And everybody kept thinking you were a boy, so your mom actually had a t shirt made up that said, I am a girl. Maybe it’s the story about how when you were a baby and your mother would set you down on the grass that you absolutely wouldn’t let the grass touch your body because you hated the feeling of it.

And as an adult, you still won’t walk on it in bare feet. Maybe it’s about the time that your children got into the flower in the pantry, and when you caught them, they were coated from head to toe like little flowery ghosts. And then you placed them into a bathtub where they proceeded to turn into gluey little monsters.

Yeah, that wasn’t well thought out. These stories that we repeat become the foundational stories of our life. They become part of who we are and part of our identity and how we fit in with our family, with our friends. And right about now, you might be a little bit worried about trying to scrapbook these kinds of stories.

They’re big stories. They really need to be done right. But here’s the great news. Writing these stories is actually easy. You already know the story. You’ve heard the story or told the story over and over. So you know all of the details. You know what you need to include. You know why it makes you smile.

Now you just have to write it down. Here’s the most important part of creating a layout for a foundational story. You must write your story first. It is essential for you to create a layout that makes sure that you have enough space for your full story, and in order to do that, you have to write your story first.

I’ll confess, I don’t do this for most pages. I wing it and I add my journaling in at the last minute so many times. However, that’s not going to work on a foundational story page. This isn’t a story that you can cut short. This isn’t a story where you can tell an abridged version. You need space for the full story, so you have to start by writing the story.

Let me share an example. I created a layout called No Tears, and I just found a picture of myself as a small child to go with this layout. I didn’t have a specific photo that was what I needed to use, so I just used any appropriate photo. The journaling reads, My mom told me a funny story about myself as a child.

If she was shopping, she would put my stroller in front of a three way mirror. This guaranteed that I would be happy, as I wouldn’t cry in front of myself. To this day, I still love mirrors, and I hate things that make me cry or get emotional, so I try not to watch movies like The Notebook or P. S. I Love You.

In my journaling, I did two things. I told the story that I’ve heard from my mom over and over again about sitting me in front of a three way mirror and how I wouldn’t cry. I tied it in to the current day so that I could tell a little bit about how that’s still part of who I am now. And I made sure I had enough room for my journaling on this page, but it’s actually not that much journaling.

So in case you were worried that these have to be super long stories, they really don’t. In fact, I’ll take you back to the example about not putting me on the grass. Instead of writing a long narrative story, I used a few different elements to really help convey my page. I actually have a picture of me laying on the grass trying not to touch it as a baby.

I’m traumatized. And of course they took a picture, so I’m gonna use it down the side of the page. You see speech bubbles that say. Mommy, daddy, anybody, help me, save me, rescue me. And then a great big title across the page that says, get me off the grass. There’s even a little picket sign down on the bottom where I made some faux grass and it says, say no to lawns.

And I really feel that this page is a great way to tell this foundational story about how much I hated being on the grass. And it really doesn’t have that many words. So these foundational stories don’t have to be long and eloquent, they don’t have to be tons of words. Short and sweet is totally fine.

Now if your story is longer, and you’re worried about fitting that all into a scrapbook page, you can do a couple of things. One, it might be the perfect time to type out your journaling. It’s a lot easier to size it in order to fit on your page if you’re typing it. And since you know that you have a really long story, you can pick a page design that gives you a lot more space.

I personally really love split page designs for really long stories where one half or one third of your page is dedicated just to the journaling and the other half or two thirds is there for your photos and embellishments. One page that I made that tells a foundational story about how I got the scar on the back of my hand is called The Scar.

And it has a split page design. Now, I didn’t have to type the journaling. I was able to print it all out on one half of the layout. But it turned out really good, and I’ll be sure to share that in the show notes. At this point, you might be wondering, what makes a story a foundational story? So I’ve given you the task of finding stories that get repeated often when you’re with your family or friends, because I think that often those stories have that shared element and they have that lasting effect.

You’ve had time to reflect on it. I think it really comes down to what kind of memories you have about that, what kind of impact it’s had on you. And given that time to reflect over the years, it’s probably a story about an element of who you are or who you were. And you can tell from the examples that I’ve shared that it doesn’t have to be groundbreaking.

It can be something as simple as not liking being on the grass or being mistaken for a boy, where you had a shirt that said, I’m a girl. Or not being able to cry in front of yourself, or the story of how you got that scar on your hand. None of these stories are big and significant. They’re not like some of the topics that we’ve covered throughout this series, where we talked about your personality.

We talked about your values and beliefs. We talked about your influences. All of those stories have a much deeper significance, but these foundational stories are little elements of you and what you’re made up of. They’re part of what made you become the person that you are. So here’s my homework to you.

Find some foundational stories and get them in your scrapbooks. What are the stories that get passed around when you get together with your friends or get together with your family? Do you have those stories in your scrapbooks? And don’t feel guilty if you don’t. Honestly, the reason that I came to realize the significance of these is because I scrapbooked a couple of them and realized how awesome it was to finally get those stories in my scrapbooks.

So no guilt, just move forward and make the pages. And if you can’t think of one of these stories off the top of your head, I get it. You feel like you’re under pressure right now. Oh my gosh, I have to identify my foundational stories. Here is a bonus tip for you. The next time that you are together with friends or family, pay attention to the stories that get shared.

In fact, take notes. Write it down in your phone really quick. Pull out your note app and write it down. Or even better, take a small recording of everything that’s being said. You can play that back and And tell your journaling straight from that voice recording. It’s amazing. And it’s probably not going to be done overnight because next time you get together, new stories are going to come up and you’re going to have more things to scrapbook.

So this is not something that’s just going to be a checklist of foundational stories and then you’re done. They’re going to keep popping up, but when you see them and when you notice them now, you’re going to get them into your books. And just a reminder, these stories are easy to write because you already know the story.

You know all of the details already. You just have to write it down and make sure when you scrapbook it that you leave plenty of room for your story. In fact, you are going to write the story first so that you can make a layout that has enough room for it. And that brings us to the end of this 10 part series about scrapbooking yourself.

I have loved creating this series and taking a deep dive into writing and creating and telling some of these stories about ourselves. Some of those really important ones that we just have never got into our scrapbooks. At this point, you might want to go back and start at the beginning of this series and go through all 10 of the episodes to listen to them back to back to get that full experience of all the different things that you can scrapbook about yourself.

If you normally listen to the episodes on your computer while you’re scrapbooking, I’ll make sure that each of the episodes links to the next. You’re going to have to start at episode 62, so go to scraphappy. org slash episode 62 and then you’ll be able to click through going to each of the next episodes.

If you’ve enjoyed this series, please come over and find me on Instagram and let me know what you thought of the Scrapbooking Yourself series. Have you made pages about yourself? If you have never made scrapbook pages about yourself and told your own story, maybe you don’t even have an album about yourself, then I actually have a class that might be perfect for you.

I’m laughing because I hadn’t even thought to promo it this whole time. The class is called Scrapbook You, and it takes you through 25 pages to tell some of your stories. And it goes from birth to your current life, and it’s just like a highlight reel. So it’s really a highlight album about yourself. The link is at scraphappy.

org slash you, y o u. I made the class quite a while ago and so the video is super hilarious, um, but the content is amazing and the pages that I made during that class are some of my very favorites because it really helped me put a whole album together just about me, which at the time I didn’t have, but obviously since then I have deep dived into that subject.

After seeing this, I think it might be time for a part two. Let me know, is that something that you’d be interested in? Thanks for spending time with me today and for listening to this series about scrapbooking yourself. I really hope that you take some of these lessons to heart and that they help you get some of your stories into your scrapbooks.

I hope that this episode of the podcast helps you have more fun with your scrapbooking and make pages that you love, hopefully about yourself. Until next time, happy scrappin Oh, I have a PS. We have a current load challenge coming up. It’s actually a load mini where it’s a one week load challenge where we make a layout a day and we are drawing our inspiration from the movie Footloose.

It is going to be good. It is a one week of scrapbooking inspired by Footloose, but telling your stories. So come and join us for that. Go to scraphappy. org slash load, but here’s the deal. You got to do this on the mic drop because registration closes on the 11th because the first prompt goes out that night.

So get in on the action. We’ll be scrapbooking from August 12th to 18th. Are you ready to cut loose?