The Scrapbooking Journey

Cory Richardson-Lauve

Description

Take up your scrapbooking in a whole new state of mind—and spirit.

When I scrapbook, I feel empowered and connected and hopeful. I feel grateful and content and stimulated. In the process of scrapbooking, I feel the closest to my essential self, and to God.
—from the Introduction

In this imaginative, creative resource, award-winning scrapbook designer Cory Richardson-Lauve leads you on a celebration of the divine connection you can experience through scrapbooking. Weaving her own insights, techniques and artwork with the reflections and layouts of other professional scrapbookers and the wisdom of spiritual thinkers, Richardson-Lauve reveals how this innovative and dynamic craft can become a practice used to deepen and shape your life.

Each chapter includes an original scrapbooking project with dozens of variations—for both cut-and-paste and digital artists, beginning scrapbookers and published designers alike—that helps you explore a theme essential to both your designs and your spirituality.

Sujets

• Loisirs
• Arts du papier
• Arts du Papier
• Do it yourself
• Scrapbooking
• Hágalo usted mismo
• Crafts
• Hobbies

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9781594734441
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

To the young people in our care- past, present, and future- and to all others seeking peace. May they find solace in the journey.
Contents

Foreword
Introduction
1 Resonance : Finding Your Focal Point
2 Equilibrium : Seeking Balance
3 Movement : Encouraging Growth
4 Awareness : Enlarging Your Vision
5 Expression : Finding Your Voice
6 Awakening : Coming Alive
7 Celebration : Knowing Your True Self
8 Connection : Sharing Community
Appendix A: Techniques and Supplies
Appendix B: Resources
Appendix C: Contributors
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Also Available
About SkyLight Paths
Foreword

Scrapbooking started out for me as just something fun to do-a creative outlet. I loved being able to play with paper and paste while preserving hoards of pictures at the same time. In the beginning I was fascinated by the artistic nature of scrapbooking, the colorful bits and pieces that I could use in designing pages. As I became experienced, the potential to share my stories and to write intrigued me more. Then one day-I m not sure exactly when it happened-I realized that I didn t love scrapbooking so much for the cute pages or the personal expression as I did for the way it was shaping me. Scrapbooking is making me a better person. I m more aware of beauty in everyday life, more conscious of change in people around me, and more grateful for my own perspective. Because of scrapbooking, I am better able to recognize and relish fleeting moments that become priceless memories.
Cory Richardson-Lauve says it this way:
There is something deep within scrapbooking that fulfills us even beyond our artistic sensibilities. It stirs something in the soul. When I scrapbook, I feel empowered and connected and hopeful. I feel grateful and content and stimulated. In the process of scrapbooking, I feel the closest to my essential self, and to God.
I ve been involved with the scrapbooking industry from its inception. I ve read countless articles and books, and I can honestly say that Cory has captured better than anyone I know the culmination of my feelings about scrapbooking. In The Scrapbooking Journey , Cory asks the right questions so that you can discover your personal answers. Her words, if you allow them, can enlarge your understanding of the potential you have to improve your life through this amazing hobby.
Thank you, Cory.
Stacy Julian
Founding Editor, Simple Scrapbooks
Founder, Big Picture Scrapbooking
Introduction

Meditative. Healing. Communal . These are not words you would easily partner with a hobby that has sparked a three-billion-dollar industry. But there is so much more to this craft than acid-free paper and repositionable adhesive. Scrapbooking is a way of preserving family stories and legacies that goes far beyond a photograph album.
While a photograph album holds pictures, a scrapbook attaches meaning to them. It expands the images to tell who, what, when, and where. Scrapbooks also reveal something about the creator of the page. Why did she take that picture? Why are these images important to her? How do they make her feel?
Scrapbook pages are personal works of art-art infused with the vision, photography, and words of the scrapbooker. The term artist may make you uncomfortable; it was difficult for me at first, too. Although I ve always loved art of all types-dance, music, painting, sculpture, theater, poetry-I never saw myself as an artist. I thought of artists as free, unconventional people who were different from me. I was in the other category: pragmatic, conventional, secure, even boring at times. But the more scrapbooking has captivated me, the more I ve realized that art flows in and around all of us. I ve found art and artists surrounding me-and within me. We are all artists.
But there is something deep within scrapbooking that fulfills us even beyond our artistic sensibilities. It stirs something in the soul. When I scrapbook, I feel empowered and connected and hopeful. I feel grateful and content and stimulated. In the process of scrapbooking, I feel the closest to my essential self, and to God.
My Scrapbooking Journey
I started scrapbooking when I was a teenager. I would take the scraps of my life-photographs, ticket stubs, prom napkins, and colorful titles ripped from Teen Magazine -and combine them into pages that were simple and fun. After I got married, I started exploring new ways to enhance my pages. I used lots of cardstock, stencils, decorative scissors, and fancy corner rounders. I had not yet learned about design concepts; I just loved arranging paper and photographs. It made me happy. So for a few years I made simple pages on my own. Then, on a crisp fall day, I read my first scrapbooking magazine. Artwork poured out of it. Women told the stories of their lives through photographs and words, and I was captivated by the colors, the designs, the textures, and the connections.
My love for scrapbooking grew and is evident in almost every part of my life today. I see photographs everywhere, even when I don t have my camera. I notice patterns and wonder how they might combine into pages. I experience moments as gifts that can be captured, if not on paper, then in my heart.
My husband, John, and I work as Teaching-Parents with troubled teenage girls. I cannot imagine a fuller life. It teaches me to celebrate. It teaches me to let go. It teaches me to love. But because my life can get loud and complicated, I ve come to love scrapbooking as a quiet and solitary pursuit. My scrapbook journal pages, especially, tend to be eclectic in style-I am constantly exploring new ways to visually represent my musings. You won t find unity in my pages! Some are graphic, some are artsy. Some have muted colors and some are bright. But each page combines images, thoughts, and feelings that express a brief insight or reflection from a moment in time.
Keeping a Scrapbook Journal
I have written this book in the context of my own journey, but I hope the book will come to be about your journey, too. Whether you are a beginning scrapbooker or an experienced, published designer and artist-or anything in between-as long as you are a seeker, there is a place for you in The Scrapbooking Journey . I see this book as a dialogue-a conversation between you and me, between you and yourself, and between you and God. Not just a place to read and observe, but a place to participate and grow. That is why I encourage you to take the time to ponder and answer the questions in this book in a journal.
I ve always loved questions-both asking them and being asked. I think it is the questions in our lives that help us define who we are, where we ve been, and where we are going. Questions open us up to ourselves and to others. They free us from the need for certainty because they invite more questions. One of my favorite quotations speaks truthfully about questions:
I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day . 1
Questions help us grow; they keep us unstuck. Every day, our lives pose questions:
How do you see the world?
What is important to you?
How do you incorporate what you value into your daily life?
Are there things you want to let go of?
Are there new ways you want to grow?
Scrapbooking is a way to make our answers tangible and visible, to discover new facets of ourselves. I think that is why the process of scrapbooking resonates so deeply with people across the world. It gratifies our search for truth and identity. And the scrapbook journal in particular takes the focus off the events of our lives and places it, instead, on the person behind the creating.
Journey and journal have the same root word. They are both from Old French, with the root journ , meaning day. Both journeys and journals mark the passing of days. How appropriate that they go hand in hand: a journey to live and a journal in which to keep a record of living. The journey is about the process: what and who and how you see along the way. So, too, is the journal about the process: how you create and why you create and who you are while you are creating.
Each chapter of The Scrapbooking Journey concludes with a scrapbook journal experience that invites your active consideration and participation. Scrapbook journal pages are different from typical scrapbook pages in that they are more private and more experimental. They are a place to explore, to answer questions, to pose more questions. They are a place to play and try new things, a place separate from the habits of the past or the accolades of the future. I hope you will give yourself permission to fully participate in these scrapbook journal experiences as you read this book.
Things You ll Need
In addition to a blank journal, there are some basic things you will need for the scrapbooking experiences suggested in this book:

Trimmers, cutting mat with craft knife, and sharply pointed scissors.
Sheets of cardstock or a book
You choose the size: 12 12 inches if you prefer a spacious landscape, 6 6 inches or 5 7 inches if you like to keep things tiny and private. Shop for something that suits you. Or, if you prefer, start with just cardstock. Use a dimension that will slip easily into an album in the future (6 6, 8 8, 8 11, or 12 12 inches). Make sure you have enough pages for the eight scrapbooking journal experiences in the book (either single pages or double-page spreads).

Gluestick, glue dots, double-sided photo tabs, dimensional foam dots, and sticker-