Leave a Trace
If stories come to you, care for them.  And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.
Barry Lopez

We have all grieved the sudden loss of our team member, Bonnie.  She was a gifted keeper of stories for her family. To honor her I’ve chosen to focus PageKraft:WriteTrue on the significance of leaving a story.  We are all committed to keeping the images and events and beautiful pages we create as a testimony to our families experience.  But sometimes we need to drop deeper into our own hearts and think through what we want to tell others. 

What have you learned about life that might help your son?  What do you know about loss, for instance, that might nurture your niece in her long term care of her chronically ill husband?  Is there knowledge about your mother, a deep story of wisdom, that you know and need to “keep” for your own children or for those you know?  Is there some story of truth which you need to tell yourself?

Memories are particular and fragmented, and they are all we have to offer the loved ones with whom we have shared life.
Maureen Murdock

When you want to tell a story which will move another into deeper thought, tell the details - all the way down to the sensory specifics - and also tell the point.  You will have a unique twist on the details you remember and the way you write it out.  Those details, those unique qualities of your own mixing are part of how you share who YOU are.  But to tell a truth in story you will want to give the point and that does not have to be straightly told, either.  You can leave the reader with the truth in their lap without writing it out as a conclusion. 

Elena has krafted this powerful page of renewal and the lessons of loss after a great life sea-change.  The elegant design serves as a strong foundation for the transformational experience and her bold reorientation to life.

For a long while I have thought about teaching my grandpeople the importance of staying true to themselves.  It is a complicated endeavor and one requiring ongoing attention.  Worthy of a page of instruction in my opinion and from my own frame.

Think about what you might want to give back in the way of story.  What would you like for others to know that will help them on their own life’s journey.  This need not be about you but may be your own wisdom from someone else’s story. 

Life and loss and chipping away the edges teaches us things which should be shared. Join us in this different way of PageKrafting and enrich our lives with your knowledge.
Leave a trace.
Post your pages in the PageKraft:WriteTrue + Click Gallery. 
Or if you just want to read the stories others leave, see our pages more closely and find out about what great materials we used, feel free to click on the link and see what we have to share.

Find meaning in the small things.

I have a simple style. My pages are clean and often minimally embellished. My photos, story, and some great papers are my pagekraft. Simplicity can also help the small details of your photos shine. Get close to your photos, step closer, look at the bits that aren’t always so obvious. What small things in your life provide meaning?

When I took my photos, I had no idea the story they would tell. Through my lens, I discovered the Made In Italy stamp. It made these more special. I focused on it and photographed it since it gave the wine opener character and history and context. Over dinner I discovered they were even more special.

Using macro extension tubes and a 70-200mm lens, I was able to isolate the details of our wine opener.  It’s placement in front of a north facing window ensured nice, even light on it without harsh “hot spots.”  The wooden cutting board it was placed on gives a nice texture in the background.

You can capture the small details without a macro lens or extension tubes. Use your longest focal length (the larger mm number on your lens) to get in close to capture the details. Find something that means something to you. Tell the story it holds. Share the details in the PageKraft: WriteTrue + Click Gallery.

Welcome. Today we’re looking at the slow- write page again. When Myra suggested a WriteTrue about exploring your passion, I thought it was perfect for the day after Valentine’s Day. We often think of passion as romantic or some other love for another person.  But passion is whatever deeply moves your heart, mind and interests. Passion is what keeps you awake at night filled with energy and wonder. Passion is what you dream about. Passion is where you spend your time and thought. 
If you want to WriteTrue about passion you have to reflect on what has or does turn your life in a new direction, give energy to your desires and stay with you over time.  And speaking of time, passions sometimes wear thin and their renewal- or maybe even their end -  is a worthy subject for deep consideration, too.  And there is always the issue of the search for a new passion…what one of my patients called, “The Next.  I need the NEXT.”  Our lives are refueled by our own energy and how we direct that energy shapes our hours and also who we are.  You are what you eat and you ARE what you DO and what you WANT.  Passion can also swim around ideas.  “It is time to realize that a passionately held intellectual conviction is passionate”  said Dorothy Sayers, the well-known mystery writer.

So for this WriteTrue edition of PageKraft think awhile about your own passions.  Tell the story of it’s first glimmer, it’s full development and/or it’s end and transformation. Spend time assembling your page and use embellishments that echo your writing. Let your mind wander while you create.  Give the story of your passion time to emerge. We are looking for the story as well as the identity of the specific passion.  Although it could be possible to tell the story of your passion in a series of phrases, this is less a list and more of a musing.  Let the story speak your heart.

Myra has crafted a delicious expression of her passion for photography.  The story of how she got her camera and the places it has taken her will be a lifetime base for the stories that come from this passion.

Myra’s Finding My Passion

For my page I wanted to give a glimpse of the deep passion I feel for my work as a psychologist.  I spent several days working with the layers, choosing papers and embellishments that would speak for the meaning I wanted to give. The writing was intended to share some of my method and process and convey the power of the work. 

Amazing Discovery Story

I hope you will join us in the process of documenting the story of our passions. 
Please post your pages in the PageKraft: WriteTrue+Click Gallery PageKraft: Write True+Click Gallery.
We look forward to reading your story.

Wishes & Worry
What do you wish for? What do you worry about? What is it that weighs on your heart, reminding you throughout your day that it still exists. Perhaps it’s raising your children. Perhaps it’s caring for a loved one, or simply wishing dinner would magically appear tonight.
Translating those wishes and worries to a page can be difficult. The words might flow easily, as they exist at the surface of your being. Echoing through your brain in all you do.
How do you capture it photographically?
My four year old son, will enter kindergarten this year. My brain has been consumed with my wishes and worries for those next steps. After visiting a potential school last week I knew I had to write down what I was feeling. When he has his own children, I want him to know what I was feeling as I made such an important decision for him.
How do I photograph it? What tells the story? A photo of him? Maybe. That would be easy.

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And then I found it. The lion. Perched on my desk where he’d left it this morning. Part of the pride he likes to play with. Just this morning he’d insisted I hold the “momma lion” and he hold the baby. Dad got the “daddy lion.”
And that summed it up for me. Mamma lion. Protector. Defender. Nurturer. Mother. Always watching out for his well being.
50mm lens in hand, I placed it beside a window, got close, filled the frame and shot. A wide aperture blurred the background, making the lion the focus of the photo. I wanted this page to be about the story, about my wishes and worries. I wanted the story to compliment the page, not dominate it.  You can see Ian peeking above the folders though!

The photo doesn’t have to be obvious. It doesn’t have to be your subject. It can simply convey an emotion, a feeling, a part of what you’ve written.

What are your Wishes and Worries? How can you photograph them? Or perhaps grab a photo from your archives.

PLEASE, add your own pages of YOUR Wishes And Worries to the PageKraft: WriteTrue + Click gallery. Share how you chose the not so obvious photo to enhance your story. Let us know if you want creative, constructive feedback. I hope this PageKraft helps you to WriteTrue and Click

Welcome to the inaugural post of PageKraft:WriteTrue and Click.  Every two weeks, on Mondays, we will post a new installment about creating the carefully wrought, deeply written and truly photographed scrapbook page.  Sometimes our pages are mostly visual records.  Sometimes we can convey events with a few words of circumstance. And sometimes we want to really mull a story and take time to let it transform while we create.  PageKraft will focus on these kinds of pages.  I (iUma, aka Patricia) will focus on the WriteTrue and Katrina Kennedy will focus on the Click…the photo part of a true, deep page.  We will alternate posting.
We also have a new gallery where you can post your pages for review and feedback, if you wish.  We think of this as a sort of storyboard, where we can get reactions and comments on pages in process from our colleagues.  Many have asked for this sort of gallery and now we have it.  This is less of a challenge and more of an opportunity.  Feel free to post your pages based on the themes we are exploring.  If you want feedback, let us know in your page comments. We will have new pages from Creative Team members which illustrate our ideas and we will also be selecting pages from the Member’s Gallery to include in our Blog posts.  Page selection will depend on the topic, of course.     

Biggest Story of 2009 
  We create ourselves by our choices. Kierkegard                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
Sometimes using a focus is really helpful in organizing your story.  When Anna Aspnes suggested the idea of the biggest story of 2009 I knew it would make a great beginning for exploring writing. It takes considerable thought to choose one single story which overrides the others.  And when you start responding to that choice and pick one story, sometimes you find that writing the story transforms the story into something else.  In other words, actually TELLING the story shapes it in your own memory and may even shape the memory of the people who shared the experience when they see the page in print. 

I was delighted to find this page by Digital Designers member Anne (Ellan).  She carefully details her thought process as she begins her own story for 2010.  While it is about her intentions for the next year, she also reviews her experience of the last year.  The way she works out the structure for her project is writing a story forward and expresses the selection process which shapes our lives. I think you may enjoy her individual take on the POTD journey.

Ellan’s 2010:100 Photos to Scrap

A story is a combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.  Carol Bly

I asked the Creative Team members who created pages for this project to share their thought process as they krafted their pages. 

Anna Aspnes make a beautiful page about her family’s true center for 2009

US4LIFE
and these are her thoughts about the writing:

If created just one layout for 2009 what would it be, and what story would it tell? This is the question I asked myself before I began this page.
I thought about all the stories I could tell. The one I chose to tell was based on it’s importance and meaning to me. In a nutshell it portrays the bigger picture of all the other stories I told and pages I made in year 2009.
I am grateful to be present in this life, through both the good and the bad, with my immediate family by my side. We survived another year. All 4 of us. And that itself is huge.

Katrina Kennedy krafted this story of her garden’s central place in her 2009 story

My Garden
She shared these thoughts about her process:
When thinking about my Best Story of 2009, I kept thinking of all of the difficult times. Loss of family members, uncertainty over the economy, health issues, a difficult year. Those thoughts led me to my garden. It was my safe place. My place of comfort. It make logical sense that it was my story. I began to write and realized the important story was in the feelings, not the events. I wrote in a free flowing, often incomplete sentence format to capture the essence of my feelings about my garden.

And here is my page about my biggest story of 2009

Family Legacy: Authenticate Please
And my process notes:
Writing Process Notes:  I wanted to tell this story for myself but I needed to work though just how much to put ON the page.  The story, the plot, the characters of the events of the year might make TOO MUCH of a story - for one page and for the record, if you know what I mean.  So to be true to myself and not too revealing of other people’s reality (which I can’t really know anyway) I thought a long time about HOW to express the transformation in my self during this year.  The writing itself was free form to make sure my own voice came through.  While the thinking for this page, the gathering of materials and the extraction (literally and figuratively, lol) took many, many days I completed the page on my Father’s 91st birthday.  And I LIKED that.
PageKraft Notes: This is a big page for me so I used symbols in the page that tell parts of the story for me in a sort of hidden language.  The Ace of Hearts playing card is symbolic of a core concept I use in my work as a psychologist.  Deep psychotherapy is about seeing the hand you were dealt and playing it, too.  So this card is potent in my own lexicon. The wax seal indicates my unwavering commitment to my parents - we are sealed together.  Clearly, the wings and extraction say I’m taking off from the early childhood sister conceptions.  The top book is the old story. The fresh book beneath is the NEW story I am writing.  The sassy girl peaking out of the grunge and brocade….well if you follow my pages you will probably see her again.  She’s wanting to know….“You? What about YOU? Are you living TRUE?” and are you writing true?

For the journaling and the products used on the newly created pages check out the PageKraft:WriteTrue and Click gallery shortly after the blog post appears.
And PLEASE, add your own pages of YOUR biggest story of 2009. Let us know if you want creative, constructive feedback. We are so excited about this new way of playing with story and photo and hope you will be too.
PageKraft:WriteTrue and Click