Scrapbooking without photos

Sometimes I think we get caught up with the photos driving our storytelling. I don't want to say that's wrong; however, I do want to suggest that this method may not be the only way. And it shouldn't be, especially when we have a memory we want to scrap but we don't have the photo to accompany it.

How do we deal with that? Here's a few things I've done in the past few years:

1. Scrap a page with no photos at all. I did this a couple years ago on the following page (click the page to see it larger):

   

The page started with the October Afternoon vintage typewriter sticker, which I'd gotten in a Studio Calico kit. People on the message board wondered how to use it. I decided to design a page around it by scrapping all the evidence that I am getting Old. (I felt that way again this year reading the book Flotsam to my students as an introduction to postmodernism before we started to read The Things They Carried.  A key part of the book is when the young boy takes film out of the camera and goes to a one-hour development place--remember those?--to see the photos. I jokingly explained to my students about film, one-hour photo development, and photos that can be held. My students are all the jpg generation.)

This next one that I made a few weeks ago was inspired by a loss of three photos, all of which I can vividly recall, even without the pictures:

  

I used the Airmail stamp set by Studio Calico/Hero Arts to replace the photos that otherwise would have appeared on the page. Here's some close ups:

 

Hand stitching titles is super easy. I'll post a tutorial soon.

I also like stitching circles on the page. A blog reader asked about that a while back; I'll include that in the tutorial.

  

Finally, a page I made earlier this spring. I was inspired to scrap about my favorite children's TV programs when I was growing up. I didn't want to figure out how to use a screen cap of the TV programs that I could find online, so instead I googled images of TV sets, found a vintage one I liked, copied it into Word and enlarged it, then used it as a template to paper piece my main image instead of a photo.

 

2. Pick a random photo to accompany the memory. I do this a lot, especially if I'm doing a personality page rather than an event page. Every time I print, I include random pretty-good photos of my family, just to keep on hand for when I do this kind of page. Here's one I did recently for my son, writing about what he's like at age nine:

More stitched circles.

The journaling came from the Ella ebook Essential Guide to Scrapbooking Boys. Rather than doing a page for each prompt, I used the page prompts as interview questions and put his responses on the page. The book is on sale for the rest of the month at a super duper low rate--go now!

3. Go out and take photos, even if they are not of that actual story moment. If it's not too much of a burden, I take pictures for the express purpose of accompanying the story I'm going to tell. I feel no guilt about this--I'm not "staging" anything. Heck, that's what professional writers do, with the exception of breaking news. Not every story I tell is breaking news (thank goodness!). In fact, the majority of what I do is more like feature writing, so bring on the staged photos!

Here's a recent example:

Yes, I took a picture of my shoes. They're not pretty shoes, but that kind of helped me tell the story, so that's OK.

Thanks for reading about what I do when I want to scrap a story for which I have no photos. If you want to read more about this, Write Click Scrapbook posted this great article on the same topic with even more ideas on scrapping without photos.

Have fun scrapping!