Capture the Season Week 1

Week 1 of Capture the Season has come to a close, and we've shared so many great tips with you already. If you are just finding out about this project, there's still plenty of time to join in; just stop by Jennifer's blog, Simple Scrapper, each day for tips about productivity, photography, journaling, scrapbooking products, and simplifying your memory-keeping process during this hectic holiday season.

I wanted to share my week 1 assignment with you and let you see my thought process as I pulled all of these items together. I have not scrapped my layout yet; things are pretty busy right now, so I've gathered the things I need or made notes about them instead. Then, when the holidays are finished, I'll take a few hours of "me time" and get my layouts completed.

A side note: when I was teaching, I found that thinking out loud, in front of my students, as I wrote or analyzed a piece of writing was one of the MOST effective tools I had. Not only did it make the process more transparent for my students, but it also brought me to a higher level of understanding and reflection about my own thinking and reasons for making the choices I made. So this post is just as much for my own benefit as it is for yours.

Journaling:
The first thing I did was check out the prompt and jot down a few notes. The prompt says, "The cornucopia is an ancient symbol of abundance and is a common image around the time of Thanksgiving. Share what is in your personal cornucopia basket this year with at least 4 photos of what is important in your life. Use a list format to detail all the goodness that fills your life with joy and love."

Based on my entry about journaling in lists, I knew I had a couple of options for creating my list: I could focus on activities (verbs) or people, places, and things (nouns). Still, those two categories were awfully broad, so I decided to try and find a more specific focus for my list. Yes, I wanted these to be things I am grateful for, but I wanted to go beyond that general idea too. So I went back to the prompt again. I kept coming back to that cornucopia symbol -- my list didn't have to just be things I was thankful for. It could be things that are abundant in my life. It's a "horn of plenty," after all, so what is plentiful in my life? Digging into the topic a little bit further really gave me a focus to my journaling.

I decided to do a list based on people, places, and things that are abundant in my life, which meant a simple list of these objects. However, I wanted my journaling to be a little more in depth, so I opted to choose an abstract noun and then define it with specific phrases. For example, item #1 is laughter. If you were to ask me what laughter looks like in my house, most often it is the goofy faces of my husband and my two girls. So that becomes the defining phrase that helps to illustrate the abstract concept of laughter.

The other items on my list include:
support -- a husband who encourages me to do the things I love
knowledge -- bookshelves that are full of new (to-me, that is) books
comfort -- a house full of worn but loved items that all have personal meaning to us
inspiration -- a camera that truly gives me a different perspective on the world
faith -- having trust that our needs are being taken care of
health -- a process of learning to make good decisions about what we eat and what we do
opportunity -- a positive outlook that has provided us with the chances for some amazing things
growth -- setbacks and failures that help me to see how I can change and do things differently
love -- unconditional acceptance for who I am, which makes me want to be a better person, always

Photos:
I knew that it would work best for me to do my journaling first; that would give me a few different topics to make sure I included in my photos. I planned on taking photos at the different family celebrations we had coming up for Thanksgiving, but I doubted that those photos would capture the same things I put in my list. Since I had already developed my journaling, I decided that I would find photos of people, places, and things that symbolized the abstract nouns I named in my list.

These photos will include a shot of the girls and Chris acting silly, one of my favorite photographs from either Muir Woods or Stinson Beach, a photo of a stack of books by my bed, a photo of my camera collection, and a self-portrait of myself (taken after my new haircut a few months ago).

Design:
My next step was to check out the free template (download it here). There's space to list 10 items, and there are 12 stacked blocks down the side. I knew I wouldn't find 12 photos to use, and using only 10 photos (to match up with the 10 journaling items) would leave 2 blocks to be filled with patterned paper -- that just didn't seem balanced to me. So I opted to use 4-5 photos (that I already have) and fill the rest of the blocks with patterned papers.

For my patterned papers and elements, I wanted to choose something fairly modern and graphic so that my photos and journaling would be the primary focus. This layout felt more like a Thanksgiving layout than a Christmas layout to me, so I felt it was important to choose a kit that could work for either type of layout. Luckily, my friend Liz will be releasing a great paper pack and element set (check back here on Friday for a look at it) that will work beautifully. I'm also planning on using her Presslines No. 17 Thankful For:

 

When it comes time to put everything together, I can refer back to this blog post and have everything I need. I also have it written down in my notebook that I keep next to my laptop -- it contains a running list of layouts I want to scrap, along with journaling notes, design notes, and more. It's probably my best scrapbooking tool, to be honest.

Comments

[Lori Potts]

yeah this was a fun post!!!