I've always added little stories from my childhood & younger days to my scrapbooks, but this year I really wanted to tackle that in a more organised way. I scrapbook my own story all the time so it's really the pre-scrapbooking days that are missing.
I started playing around with ideas and think I've come up with a way that will work. The keys to completing a long-term project for me are (1) a simple and repeating design (2) an overall structure to organise my pages and thoughts. I really just want to pair a photo with a memory and move on to the next one.
This project is all about the documenting and not about being creative or looking pretty - I might not even add in any scrapbooking products. I'm calling it Little Life Stories.
I really want to focus on the stories so I'm going to keep it very minimal and pared-down following my usual photo on one side, story on the other formula. 8x10 spreads to become a Blurb book when complete. I don't need to be super-creative. I want to make it easy to open up and just add a story or two each week. I don't plan to do this in a set time-frame, it might take a year. Or two. It doesn't matter.
As someone who needs structure, I'm planning to split the book into chronological sections that make sense for my life so I can have a place where each story will fit:
Childhood
Teens
20s
30s
I won't have photos for many of my stories and a lot of the photos I do have won't be great quality (hello 1970s!). I was also lucky or unlucky (I think the former) to live my teens and twenties in a world without camera phones so I don't have photos to go along with a lot of the crazy stuff we got up to. I'll just make do, use what I have and add in memorabilia, google images and current photographs if they work for the story.
I've started a notebook (real & on my phone) to jot stories down - once you start going down those memory rabbit holes...
I'm also planning a good sit-down with my box of old photos.
Jennifer Wilson at Simple Scrapper (HERE) is currently running a perfectly-time class called Before Your Story for her members, so I hope to get some great ideas from that. She suggests making a timeline and I've found that really helpful to just get a handle on what year things happened.
I have also been listening to a lot of The Scrap Gals podcasts (HERE). I really enjoyed the episodes where Tiffany and Tracie looked back at their memories of school, Summer and television - sparked so many stories for me.
I'm really looking forward to this. I think.