A quiz is truly the best journaling shortcut I know. And a good quiz can also spark stories, ideas, and insights that you might never think to record if you hadn't been asked. With that idea in mind, I decided to create an ongoing album last year to capture my life at age 33. I wrote a fun quiz just for this purpose, and answered the same questions on the last day of each month for an entire year. (My birthday is March 31, so it made sense for me to choose the last day of the month, but you really can choose any day of the month you wish.) To see the steps for creating an album link this of your own, check out my blog today.





Here's what the quiz itself looks like:



To download this exact quiz in pdf form, simply click here.

To see six months of completed pages featuring this quiz, large enough for you to read the journaling, visit my blog today!


And to win a FREE copy of Quick & Creative Quizzes, an eBook containing about a dozen completely unique (and fun!) quizzes like this one (including a recurring quiz or two), just leave a comment on this post!

After the CHA-Winter tradeshow, the Daylight company generously offered to send Wendy and I review models of two new lamps we saw at the show. I have to say that I have seen the light about one fact in particular: light quality does make a difference to my creativity, motivation, and color perception.

I had the Daylight Table Top lamp to test in my home. The light was even, natural, and it flooded a surprisingly large space. Wendy Smedley, Elizabeth Dillow, and I crowded into my family room last weekend during a girls-only sleepover, and we all had plenty of light (from just one lamp) to paint our canvases for an art project! (To see our finished projects, visit my blog sometime in the upcoming week.)


The lamp is off in this shot. We're relying on the uneven overhead lights, which cast strong shadows.


The limits of my photography skills aside, you can see how clear and natural the light is. What you can't see is how large an area it lights.


Here's another view, this time showing an optional magnifying attachment arm, which is covered by a white fabric cloth. I had everything out of the box, set up and working within 5 minutes.


Here's the optional magnifying arm. You can attach it or not; it's up to you.


And here's an image from the Daylight website that better shows the scale of the lamp.

I'm used to working underneath an old artists' lamp, circa 1986. (It looks exactly like the lamp in the Pixar logo that hops into place at the beginning of any Pixar film.) The light it casts is very yellow, and it gets so hot that I'm surprised I haven't caught on fire yet. So the difference was amazing! The Lucas household is hooked.

And as for the Smedley household, they're on board as well. Wendy was able to try out the Twist Portable Lamp, which is small and compact and easy to take to crops or move from room to room in your house. It would be great to take to a crop as well (as long as there's an available power outlet) to help combat the unpleasant fluorescent light at many crop venues.

This image, borrowed from the Daylight website, shows the lamp itself better than I could. (You can clearly see how you can angle the lamp to light up your workspace, and how it folds into a tube for easy transportation.) But I did take some illuminating photos of a layout Wendy recently created.


The lamp is off in this picture. But isn't the layout adorable, nonetheless? The journaling says, "I forget you are nine years old SOMETIMES. I know that seems silly, but after all, you do have four older brothers, and they are all teenagers. You know the newest lines from The Office and have a vast knowledge of popular music. I reguse to let you have your own email address or Facebook page until you are older, even though you ask regularly. I do try to do things with you that are age appropriate and sometimes it is just you, me, and dad heading to the park. For now I try to balance the big kid stuff with enough fun stuff for your age because I do not want you to grow up too fast."


Now we'll shed some nice, natural-looking light on the subject. The colors of the layout in this picture are far more true.

Are you convinced? Well, the Daylight Company is offering to give one of each lamp away to a lucky Ella reader! Just leave a comment letting us know what kind of light you use in your scrapbooking (recessed, chandelier, fluorescent, floor lamp, table-top lamp, etc.), and we'll pick two random winners to receive either the Daylight Twist Portable Lamp ($74.99) or the Daylight Table Top Lamp, with magnifier ($129.99). Let's hear it!

p.s. You can still comment on yesterday's giveaway until midnight, April 1! I'll announce winners for both contests on Monday.

I started scrapbooking in June 2004, but I didn't really hit my story-telling groove until early 2005 when I read Clean&Simple by Cathy Zielske.



This book changed the way I scrapped. I started telling meaningful stories about people and relationships and just general observations about life; I stopped scrapbooking every single photo I loved; and I started scrapping out of chronological order. I found my groove and haven't looked back ever since.

These days, I don't have much difficulty journaling on my pages, especially when I'm writing about things that happened recently. It's easy to remember how excited the boys were about the Olympics last month or how proud my older son was when a friend phoned him to ask for help with his math homework, but ask me about something that happened last year or the year before, and my memories are a lot fuzzier. Even worse, ask me what my son's favourite book or song or video was in 2003, back in my pre-scrapbooking days, and I might not be able to tell you. I often find myself stumped for meaningful stories to tell about my pre-2004 photos.



It's a bit sad, isn't it? My boys are now 7 and 9, and they don't have baby albums. I have scrapper's block when it comes to my boys' baby and toddler photos. Thousands of digital files, chock full of chubby-cheeked cuteness, are sitting on my external hard drive, just waiting to be scrapped. Where do I even begin? I had no idea.

Last month, in a seemingly unrelated part of my life (in my office at work), I was cleaning out the old messages from my sent email folder. The IT guys were cracking down on our email storage limits, and I was at risk of having my old messages archived onto an inaccessible drive somewhere in some dark, dank dungeon if I didn't clean up my files. Okay, I made up the part about the dungeon, but the rest of the story is true.

During this email clean-up exercise, I deleted thousands of sent messages about meetings, presentations, missing data, and other unimportant details of projects long since completed. What a dreary, time-consuming task!

But hold on… what was this?! It was a short, two-liner email I'd sent to my sister about the funny face my son made when he tried peas for the first time. Oh, look at this one… a message I sent to my husband about the cute little conversation I had with our then two-year old as we walked to daycare that particular morning. It turns out that I'd discovered a treasure trove of scrapbooking material hidden amongst the trash in my sent box.

With this discovery, I was inspired to create an email-related page, and I challenged two of my talented scrappy friends to do the same.

Lisa Kisch found an email that she'd sent to her friends and family when her daughter, Lily, was just a wee babe. She paired the text from her email message with an adorable photo from the same time period, and the results are beautiful and meaningful.



If you can't see the journalling on the layout, here's what the email said:

Lily is 8 weeks old now, and such a precious baby. She just loves to be cuddled and kissed, and she's a wonderful eater and sleeper. The other night she slept 7 hours in a row! (We won't talk about last night, though, ha ha!) She is about 13 lbs., and is already wearing some 3 month clothing. She is smiling, and following things with her eyes. She loves her mobile and Mr. Panda on the bouncy chair. She is very strong and can hold her head up like a champ! Audrey adores "baby sistah" and is a very big help. Here are photos of Lily, taken today, and one of Audrey, too. I am such a lucky Mommy to have two such sweet and lovely girls!

Stephanie Howell  took my challenge in a different direction and created a page about how her husband's emails from abroad help sustain her when he's deployed. The raw emotion she captured on this page gave me goosebumps.



This page must mean a lot to Stephanie personally, but it also serves to remind the rest of us of the sacrifices that military families around the world make so that all of us may continue to live the blessed lives we're accustomed to living. So to Steph and her family and to all the other military families out there, thank you!

Finally, I'll leave you with my project, created from the emails that started this journey of discovery. I transcribed a few conversations between my precocious toddler and me from email messages to journalling bubbles in Photoshop Elements and printed them out include on this page.

 
Can you read the journaling? I didn't think so. It says:

J: Mommy, look at all the clouds!
M: Oh, wow... what colour are the clouds?
J: Pink!
M: Ummm, I think they are mostly white. Maybe a little bit pink.
J: Oh, they are mostly white.
J: Mommy, I hear a bird.
M: Yes, I hear a bird too.
J: (pointing) Mommy, look there's a bird over there!
M: Yes, I see it.
J: Oh, another bird! He's flapping his arms.
M: (laughing) No, those are his wings. The bird is flapping its wings.
J: Oh, he's flapping his wades.
M: His wings...
J: Oh... wings!
M: James, look! A kitty is crossing the street.
J: I don't see him.
M: Over there, by the blue car.
J: Oh... hi, Kitty! (big smile)
M: He looks like our kitty.
(Cat rubs up against our legs.)
M: Okay, we have to go now. Bye, Kitty!
J: Bye, Kitty! See you a-morrow!

I had a lot of fun creating this page. It's one of my favourite pages with photos from my pre-scrapping days. I plan to search through the sent mail folders on several other email accounts I have, in hopes of finding the next meaningful story to tell.

How about you? Does your email account hold any undiscovered gems? I challenge you to do a quick search through your old messages and find a meaningful story to tell.

I am knee deep in layouts and albums, from the past 14 years, oh my! I have thoroughly enjoyed reminiscing about the memories attached to making these layouts as well as the actual memories captured.
I found one layout that I want to share (“As seen in the November/December 2008 issue of Simple Scrapbooks magazine. Copyright Creative Crafts Group. Posted with prior permission from the publisher.”)  because the journaling is so real. The layout was based on a book called 52 Projects and one of the projects was to write a one-minute autobiography. I highly recommend giving this a try.


Project #45

Write a one-minute autobiography.

Don’t necessarily start at the beginning, and don’t worry about the ending. Indeed, do not let any kind of chronological order hinder your effort. A good place to start is the first thing that comes to mind. Once you start writing, other memories will pop into your head. Go with them. The interruptions enhance the flow.

Once the minute is up, read over what you have written, and then immediately repeat the exercise. Keep going for as long as you can.