Scrapbook Scavenger Hunt
Join me on this end of year reflection activity
Today, I’m sharing with you of my favorite activities from my Almanac workshop -- the Scrapbook Scavenger Hunt.
What is a Scrapbook Scavenger Hunt?
A scrapbook scavenger hunt is a way for you to go back through your completed pages and albums, and use what you learn to inform future decisions.
We are embarking on this hunt to help us discover and understand the ways in which we like to document our stories. Knowing what you like (and knowing what you don’t like) are a big part of appreciating and understanding your own personal creative style.
When you start a new project, and you’re staring at a completely empty, white space, it helps to have a sense of yourself, what your strengths are, and what you love. Being cognizant of these things (which together are the ingredients of your personal style) doesn’t mean you have to rely on them every time! But if you’re like me, you want to maximize the creative time you get to spend, and look at an empty page as something full of potential, instead of an empty space.
There are so many different observations that you can make while flipping back through your pages. I encourage you to pick out a few ways in which you want to look at your pages—like a lens—instead of going into this scavenger hunt open-ended.
The goals of this process are as follows:
Decide what themes/elements/ideas you want to observe in your albums.
Understand what you liked (or disliked) about pages that you’ve previously made.
Take notes on the elements or styles that are important to you.
Think about the things you observed in your albums, and decide what you want to bring forward into your future projects (especially those coming up in 2024).
Throughout this process, I’ll be playing along and sharing observations from my own albums.
Guidance on Picking Out Albums
I encourage you to pick out at least three projects to review.
You can choose whatever albums you like, but I do suggest a little bit of variety. I’ll be choosing an older everyday stories album (a chronological album from 2014), a more recent completed album (Book of Me from 2023), one album that I just really love (my 2022 Week in the Life album), and another album I’ve been working on very recently (my DIY Scotland travel album). These albums are different enough that I’ll get an excellent variety of page stories and styles to observe.
For you — pick out whatever albums are calling to you. These usually wind up being the ones that we can learn and understand the most from.
Specific Elements to Look For
There are infinite ways, or lenses, through which you can observe your past projects. You can focus on your use of color, or the evolution of your storytelling style, the different techniques you used, etc.
I will be observing my pages through the pillars of feminist scrapbooking:
Pictures
Words
Creative Supplies
Bits of Life
And a Feminist Lens
Because these are my feminist scrapbooking building blocks, it’s an incredibly useful framework for looking at my pages. It’s breaking each page down into its component parts and analyzing those. This also makes it super easy to decide what I like/dislike about these building blocks, and then carry those over into future projects.
Pictures
I love taking photos. It’s how I got into scrapbooking in the first place. As I was flipping through my albums, one of the things I noticed over and over again was that my favorite pages have great photos. It was so easy to love a page if the photos were awesome.
Words
Small bits of journaling. Catching the different details and putting them in little spots. Writing 1-2 sentences for each thing I want to document, and then putting it all together to create a cohesive story.
Creative Supplies
Bold letters. Great color palettes. Handwriting. Stamping. I came across multiple pages that used creative supplies in such an inspirational way, and in ways that I definitely want to bring forward into 2024. A few things I noticed as I was flipping back through pages — I always love big bold titles. While I’m making pages, sometimes I feel a big bold title might be too extra. But going back through these albums, it’s one of my favorite parts. So for next year, I’ll have to keep in mind that big bold titles are well worth it.
Bits of Life
The bits of life were found mostly in my Scotland (adventure story) album. I love using all sorts of found items in my travel albums. I also included a few items in my Week in the Life album as well.
I don’t know that I necessarily need to bring more bits into my everyday stories? They work really well in my adventure stories, and honestly that’s good enough for me.
Feminist Lens
Book of Me is filled with great feminist pages. This full page black and white selfie with the painted wood makes me very happy. It’s a nice reminder that vulnerable stories about our lives don’t have to be spelled out in prose every time.
Share Your Scavenger Hunt Observations
Now it’s your turn! Join us in the ALP community and discuss what came up for you as you’re flipping through and reviewing your albums. We have a dedicated forum post up for precisely this discussion.
Additional reminder that this activity is just a tiny part of the Almanac course and workbook. If you want more, the course is a great way to really jump in and take stock of what you already love, and how you want to bring that forward in a way that really does work for you and your life right now.
Tips for Overcoming Challenges
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, start with either the last album you created or your favorite scrapbook album (whichever is easier).
If this feels like a lot, you can also just flip through your album(s) and decide on your favorite pages. Skip all the other observations and just look through your albums and put a little post-it note on the pages that you really love.
Not sure about what you think about a page or an album? Skip it and move on to the next one. This isn’t really about analyzing every single thing that you’ve made in these albums, it’s about getting a general idea or a feel for what has worked for you in the past. If you don’t know how you feel about a page or an element? No worries, you’ve got plenty of other examples to look at.
Discovering Our Creative Evolution
One of my favorite parts of this scrapbook scavenger hunt process is seeing all the growth. A big reason that I love scrapbooking my life is because I get better at it all the time. That’s not to say that every page is better than the previous page. It means that I can flip through an album from five years ago and an album from the past six months and see how my skills have grown. It’s such a big feeling of accomplishment. It makes me feel good to know that when I’m creating, I’m not just making beautiful things or telling special stories, I’m leveling up my skills.
A Few Personal Favorites
Here are a few favorite pages from the albums I reviewed:
I love the photos and journaling on this one. It’s all about making Daily Pages. I grabbed a bunch of my favorite Daily Pages and created a collage that folded in on itself.
I paired the collage sheet with four simple Daily Pages that signified something special about my style. The journaling around the outside is one of my favorite ways of storytelling. Arrows and targeted journaling. Definitely my style.
So many of my favorite pages are interactive. The above page is all about my favorite TV stories. I made a tag for each show and placed them all into a half page pocket and added some great ribbons at the top.
This is a waterfall photo page in my Scotland. I had so many incredible photos from this one spot, and this was a great way to showcase them all.
I want to take parts of each of these layouts into my 2024 projects.
Embracing the Learning Process
Another thing I love (and I know so many of you do as well) about scrapbooking is that I am constantly learning. There are always new things to learn about, new ways to tell stories, new cameras and technology to enhance the experience, and so much more.
My love of learning new things is one of the big contributors to leveling up my scrapbook skills. This review process is a great reminder that a lot of the best elements in my recent pages are because I actively sought out to learn a particular skill or technique. Give yourself some positive reinforcement!
Fantastic article! Off to continue the course.