Scrapbook journaling is a combination of typical journal or diary writing with the artistic craftiness of scrapbooking. Most journals tend to be places where people write their thoughts and feelings, to express things they may not otherwise feel comfortable telling other people. A scrapbook is a book that someone decorates and creates using pictures, cutouts, stamps, text, and other materials to create a lasting record of events or occasions. Scrapbook journaling seeks to combine these two concepts to create a journal where someone can write down his or her thoughts and feelings, while also embellishing those ideas with drawings, cutouts, stamps, pictures, and other creative touches.
The idea of scrapbook journaling is not revolutionary; many people who keep journals or diaries tend to occasionally draw inside them. Some types of scrapbook journaling, however, are far more elaborate than a typical journal with a few drawings on the inside when someone was not sure what else to write. The freely flowing ideas that typically fill a journal are accompanied by the structure, layout, and planning that usually goes into making a scrapbook. By combining these two concepts, someone is free to be more creative and imaginative both in expressing his or her artistic qualities and in relaying thoughts and feelings to the journal.
These two ideas are typically combined in one of two different ways, though a combination of the two is certainly possible. Often a person will start off with a journal that he or she is writing in, and then adds embellishments similar to scrapbooking. This can include photographs, paper cutouts, drawn images, stamps, and any other additions often found in scrapbooks. These will often be incorporated into the writing, and may reflect the ideas being written about or the events that occur in an entry.
The other common way that scrapbook journaling can happen is for someone to begin creating a scrapbook and start adding written entries to it much like a journal. In this type of situation, pages are created with a preconceived vision of a layout and templates can be used to create a scrapbook. Nice paper can often be used and written on separately, and then this can be attached to the pages of the scrapbook using glue dots or other fasteners. This type of scrapbook journaling may be more structured than the former, but both are intended to create a final product of great personal and artistic expression.
