Elizabeth is one of those people that I wish I knew in person. One of these days I'll get a chance to meet up with her and talk scrapbooking, books, teaching, music, and all the other things we have in common. She's a phenomenal storyteller, and her scrapbook pages get right to what matters most: telling a story with pictures and words. Her blog is proof of that same incredible voice; spending time in her pages or on her blog is much like I'm sure spending time with her in real life would be: full of humor, intelligence, and great stories.
When Audrey invited me to be a part of this guest blogger
series, she asked if I would talk about using timelines to build pages and
guide journaling. Absolutely! I love a good timeline. When I was teaching high
school history before my children were born, I always started a new unit with
one; it was fun to see my students measuring off years, decades, even centuries
of history and arranging stories in the right order. Sometimes if a unit end
coincided on a Thursday leaving Friday open for something new, we would take a
break and play one of my favorite history games called Chronology, a game where the objective is to build timelines and
place events in the right order—always easy at first (which comes first on the
timeline: the fall of Rome or the invention of the Model T?) but increasingly
difficult as the game went on. Even the most reluctant of my students played
along, clearly enjoying themselves despite their best anti-history class
instincts. There is something comforting about a timeline when so much of the
world is painted in grey; a timeline is black and white. It’s only the first
part of the equating to truly understanding history, though; making the jump to
filling in the details of events and interpreting their impact is the real work
of history, and the work we do in scrapbooking.
As long as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in
chronology. Understanding how events unfold in history is inextricably tied to
my love of scrapbooking, because I love a good story—and everyone knows scrapbooking
is really about telling small stories that add up to one really big story,
which eventually connect to another generation’s really big story, creating
connections that transcend life expectancies and geography.
I really like playing with pretty paper just for fun, too.
But sometimes I like to think about the real significance of what it is we’re
doing in our respective scrapbook spaces.
So, timelines. They really are a terrific technique to try
in scrapbooking, because they serve two very distinct purposes:
1.) to
help the people viewing our pages understand specific details about our lives
and
2.) to
help us organize events in our own minds.
Sounds easy? It definitely is. So easy that we forget how
useful it can be, actually. Here are a few examples to get you started.
I created this timeline page for an assignment at Ella Publishing Co. as a way to sum
up an entire decade on one layout. It was fun to create; obviously there is no
way I could fit every single thing that happened to me between 2000-2009, but I
definitely documented some of the things that defined much of those years. It’s
a very traditional way to incorporate information, and came together quickly.
It would be very easy to include twelve boxes and sum up each month of a year
the same way!
Because we move so much due to my husband’s career in the
Air Force, I wanted to capture a quick list of places we’ve lived in the first
15 years of our marriage. My daughters love to see a visual representation like
this, and I wanted to interpret all those moves for them in a simple way—that
wherever we go, having each other is the most important part. I’m sure one day
I’ll be using lists like these to remember where exactly we were living in any
given year, too!
Tip: to perfectly
space your years as I did, simply create a timeline and include every year;
then use your software’s method of distributing the space evenly, and go back
and delete the years you don’t need. Or, if imperfect measurements don’t keep
you up at night, just eyeball it. That works, too!
When you think in terms of events and timelines, you’ll no
doubt recognize the pivotal “before and after” events quickly—sometimes,
they’re even announced from your refrigerator. I’ll never forget how I opened
my refrigerator three years ago and was stopped in my tracks by this orange
juice container, which was dated three days past the due date of my third
daughter. Suddenly, my life was defined by a timeline of everything that still
needed to be done before the date on the orange juice container and everything
that would change forever after the orange juice expired. If I actually plotted
it out, it might look something like this:
Silly, perhaps. But it made a huge impact on me.
I used this same kind of before/after thinking to make this
page that appeared in my book The
Scrapbooker’s Almanac:
I know very little about my grandma’s life before she was
married, and even though this page doesn’t provide any new facts, it does
inspire me to imagine what her life might have been like, and to consider how
my own has changed over the years. It’s definitely an abstract way of using a
timeline, but thinking about her life as a series of unfolding events helped me
organize this page. You don’t have to use a traditional timeline to think of
things in a… timeline-esque way.
Timelines don’t have to be actual lines and hatch marks,
either! I consider this series of time-lapse photographs to fit into the
category of timeline scrapbooking. You can choose any subject matter to
recreate your own photographic timeline of events; it’s a fun way to see them
unfold.
I recently saw a family tree featured in
an article in Ohdeedoh and instantly fell in love with the creative method
the artist used to present a family’s basic information. It got me thinking in
terms of timelines, too—since each ring inside a tree represents a year, I
decided to make my own and create a family tree that doubled as a visual
representation of the years my husband and I have been together (six years of
dating, and almost fifteen years of marriage). I drew the circles freehand in
pencil, then carefully painted over them with a paintbrush in acrylic paint.
The result is a unique addition to our family album!
Note: you can find the
original, far more professional version here.
Spread the word and support her unique Etsy shop!
Whether you’re documenting the events leading to the birth
of a child, a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, or even how your own life fits in
with historical events, using a timeline can organize the details and theme of
a page in a fun and functional way!
Elizabeth Dillow
currently lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming with her husband and three daughters. She
is the author of The Scrapbooker’s Almanac, an instructor for Big Picture Scrapbooking, and the co-founder and
content editor for Write. Click. Scrapbook. She loves her iMac, Canon 5D, Pilot
pens, and sports teams from Cleveland.
www.elizabethdillow.typepad.com
www.writeclickscrapbook.com
www.bigpicturescrapbooking.com
