Why do we scrap?  Well, for many reasons of course.  For me, it is a creative outlet.  And my digital scrapping allows for this creativity without taking up too much space (which I don’t have).  I love the colors and the fun elements and the papers and the techniques and the process.

It is also a way to show off photos.  I am always trying to improve my photography as well as my post processing, and scrapping gives me a canvas on which to display my work.  This will allow future generations to see our little sliver of humanity though my eyes, giving them a glimpse of who we are.

It can be therapeutic as well, allowing emotions to roll out through journaling or art journaling.  Kind of like a “Dear Diary” in visual form.  This has helped many through difficult times and cannot be discounted.

But honestly, above everything else, scrapping is a way to tell our stories.  I would give so much for the stories of my grandparents or great-grandparents.  I would love to know what they did or felt beyond the photos taken.  I want to document our lives in a way that allow us to remember the big and little things, looking back on them with smiles and tears.  And I want those that come after us to know who we were as well.  We will become our family’s history, and that is cool.

With that in mind, today is the kick off of a really fantastic event at The Lilypad.

WE ARE STORYTELLERS

It will include four weeks of challenges (2 per week), tutorials (3 per week), chats (1-2 per week) and inspiration (too much to count).  You will have the opportunity to win prizes to the store and share with your TLP community regularly.  But more importantly, you will have a chance to continue to Tell Your Stories.

Here’s what it will look like:

Week 1 – telling stories through photos Week 2 – telling stories through words Week 3 – telling stories through color, texture and scale Week 4 – Master Storytelling – bring it all together!

 Also, starting today, you will be able to collect the pieces of this HUGE and FANTASTIC TLP Collab.  You really, really want to set a reminder to pop into the Storytellers forum each and every day for the next month to pick up part of it.   Each piece will only be available for 24 hours so don’t miss even one.  Once you have all of the parts, you will end up with this…

Told you!  You are going to love this kit.  And I was not kidding about it being HUGE.  Each day is a mini-kit all on it’s own.  Yay for the TLP Designers… they ROCK.  Plus, you may just find yourself looking at sales and specials from the different designers each day… just sayin’…

Now, head on over to the TLP forum and check out the first challenge.  And come back often, because you will be amazed at how much goodness is packed into this month.  The Pollys have been hard at work and we cannot wait to see your pages and hear your stories!

Enjoy and Have a great Story Telling week.

Hi all, Sarah here. As I’ve mentioned before, I love all of the premade cards that are out there and ready for journaling and possibly embellishments to be added, but I also love creating my own cards from all the wonderful digital kits available to us. We recently found out that we are going to have to move so I wanted to record this information in my Snap album. These two pages are kind of companion pages. The first one includes my to do list and I talk about how many times we have moved. The second page has no extra journaling, just the word art included in the kit, but it still serves to remind me to calm down and take it slow. I begin by cropping the papers included in the kit to the size of my pockets and then I add extra layers just as I would embellish a typical journaling card. I love using full kits to help me tell my story in this manner.   For my first layout I chose to use the Home collab by Kaye Winiecki and Studio Basic. It has so many great elements included that I knew would work well for capturing this news about our upcoming move. Here is the left side page that I created. For this pocket I loved all the little pieces of newspaper bits that were included in the kit and I knew that I wanted to use them along with the for rent sign. For me this card captures a little bit of the house hunting and packing that is about to happen. This next card is my OMG not again card. I wanted to record how many times we’ve moved in our married life. The numbers included in the kit were perfect, and to create the number sign I took a doodle that was included in the kit and cut it down. It was the perfect addition. The last card on the page is a little different, I decided to add a stamp to the card before printing it out. This to do list was perfect to document the things I’m going to need to do over the course of the next month and a half. I love the bright cheery house in the kit, and decided to use it here to remind myself that change can be good. For my second page I decided to use Seize by Allison Pennington. I love the calm colors and the word strips that are included in the kit serve as further reminders not to panic during this process. Here is the right side page. I love this bird just sitting here.. I was originally going to place it on the card like it had been stamped on it before printing, but I decided that I really like the dimension that the layering gives it against all of the birds in flight on the card. The alphabet in the kit really captured my attention so I knew I wanted to feature it in a prominent way. I love how these letters just pop out against the the wood background. If you feel inspired to create your own pocket cards from a digital kit make sure to check out the Pocket Scrapping Art Journaling challenge in the Art Journaling forum. The current challenge begins today and runs for two weeks.  All participants that post their pages by 11:59 pm EDT on August 2nd will receive a $2 coupon from Amy Wolff. I can’t wait to see your creations.