JOURNALINGin SCRAPBOOKSJournaling is the hardest part for all of us. I hope that this information that I have put together might be of some help to you. I for one hope that my future generations will find my Scrapbooks helpful and learn something from them as well. I hope that they will want to keep and cherish them for as long as they last. Journaling helps the future generations know who you were, and how you lived your life. It is a part of your family history, your bible, your story, It will tell what happened in the world when you were here. Your future family members will be able to learn the events of history and your family history through your eyes instead of from a matter of fact boring encyclopedia or a pictureless diary. You can explain your feelings and perspective of the events in your book. Who, What, Why, When, and Where are the key. If you are able to answer these questions in your journaling you will have done a great service in putting the story and events together for someone. Find a theme for the page or pages. Most all call these toppers or headers. Put the details of what is going on in the picture somewhere on your page or pages. If the space is available put a short poem, lyrics to a song or joke or something a little more personal about the person or persons in pictures. Like Uncle Joe can play an instrument name the instrument and his favorite song to play or that Aunt Suzi makes the best homemade cookies and put the recipe on the page. Why journal? Well say you are sitting with your grandkids and you are looking at some pictures and they were taken 20 to 30 years ago. The children ask who is that person and for the life of you, you can not remember. This is the reason. Future generations might not feel the scrapbooks are of no great value if there is no words to go with the pictures. Worried about your handwriting? Do not be. Your family members will love, and appreciate it even more because it is more personal. If you handwriting is well lets say unledgible then by all means use your printer, there are lots of pretty free fonts available to you. Before you choose this method of printing find out about the ink that your printer uses. Is it acid free? How long does it take before the ink will fade? You should be able to go to their websites or they should have a 1-800 number you can call and ask. I know for sure that one of Epsons printers uses acid free ink and wont fade for 200 years and one of HPs Printers is not acid free. So be sure and check it out. I do not know how the refill ink kits are but I do not recommend them as they tend to leak and mess up your mother boards on your printers. That brings me back to fonts. I could write a whole page on fonts, but I am going to try and keep it simple. Just be careful not to install to many into your fonts directory or your computer will slow way down and eventually crash. Also I would not uninstall any of the fonts that come with your computer, because they are needed by some webpages to view properly. Just type in free fonts into your search engine and you will be amazed at what you will find. There is no need to buy cds with Fonts on them you can get so many for free. Just seems like a waste of money to me and we could spend that money else where in our scrapping. What I do with my fonts is this. I made a new folder in my documents and I downloaded all my fonts into this new folder. I go through it and find the font I want to use then I minimize it and keep it down on my task bar and the computer will recognize it till I close it out. It is very simple to do. There are some font programs that help organize or view. I do not know that much about them so I can not recommend one at this time. Do you write at a slant instead of a straight line? I do this and I hate it. I bought one of those pens and a few templates to ease this burden but found out that the dissapearing ink will fade your paper in time so glad I never used that pen. What I am planning on doing now is just using the templates and making my own lined paper to coordinate with my theme and colors. I hope this has helped you in some small way. As I learn more I will add more tips on journaling. |