GATHER Story Kit from Ali Edwards

I subscribed to Ali Edwards Story Kit 'Gatherings' this month. It's a series she does monthly with lots of great thought provoking prompts and digital elements to add to your collection and help tell your stories in your scrapbooks. There are also physical product options if you are a more traditional (non digital) or hybrid (combination of digital and traditional) scrapbooker.

Each month I'm doing an 8.5x11 spread to touch on the theme, then plan to add each month's theme to my overall approach to our annual album. This allows me to use more of the fun elements in the kit as they pertain to what happens in our lives as the year goes on.

The approach to my Project Life format album this year is more monthly in nature than weekly. I'm also taking themes of my word of the year, (Balance) and the Story Kit themes and carrying them through as jumping off points to storytelling.

Shown here is my page 2 of the spread. Part of the exercise today was seeing what in my life is gathered...people, things, etc. As I looked around I confirmed what I always knew about myself: I categorize and gather like items together. Frequently. Obsessively at times.

This memory keeping, scrapbooking, writing, storytelling thing is a big part of my routine. It's pretty important to me and I think my family enjoys the end result. It also takes a lot of gathering of...stuff...thankfully I've got a bigger hard drive than I do physical space to collect the fun things that give me inspiration.

Check out the links for ways to put together the stories and photos.

Sunlight

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself. -Desiderius Erasmus

New Year!

Welcome to 2015.

Have a few things to share with you!

December album was a success! I took off on the idea to put all our Christmas cards in a ring album and built some story telling of the month around it. Got it completed yesterday! I'm thrilled with how it turned out and most importantly it helped rekindle my enjoyment of taking pictures and gave me my functional Photoshop refresher I needed to hit the ground running with our annual album in the style of Project Life.

Towards the middle of the month Ali Edwards launched monthly Story Kits in Digital format. This is a monthly themed class with guidance on the theme and several elements to help you put together pages or an album, whatever you wish, to get more variety and focus in our story telling. I love writing, her approach, and the prompts to help flesh out the thoughts I have based on the themes. These kits are also available in physical products, and they are beautiful as well! Digital just seems easier for me.

I plan to not just document the everyday as I've become accustomed, but also keep the monthly themes going throughout the rest of the year now that they are somewhat top of mind. Each month I'll do an introduction page or two+ with words and photos, then revisit the theme as the year goes on. For example, 'Firsts' was the theme for December 15-January 14. Going forward, as a relevant 'first' comes to mind or occurs, I'll use the digital elements, photos, words tell the story and relate it back to the original theme. I'm hoping this, and keeping my word of the year, 'balance', more present through words and photos will break up the monotony I was finding in recent years with this album.

Here's a little glimpse into the first couple pages of the annual album. I'm not much for sharing too many of our personal family moments and photos on a public blog but if a neutral page comes up or I can block out personal info as the year goes on, I'll certainly do so. I think it's helpful for people new to this whole thing to see how it comes together.

I've chosen some kits from both Becky Higgins and templates and elements from Cathy Zielske which are more earthtone in color. I'm also employing the lots of whitespace philosophy. It saves time and looks more clean. I tend to be all colorful in the beginning of the year and more plain as it goes on. I'm not too worried about matchy match this year....just whatever strikes me at the time.
Questions?
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C.