Birth Announcements

For parents: Have you still a copy of your child’s birth announcement?
If so you can get out and think about how you felt when you sent it out.

If you haven't still got one, then create a birth announcement - include not just the details of name, time, weight etc., but something about how you feel on becoming a new parent.

Now create a journal or scrapbook page with perhaps a photo of the baby and the birth announcement.

New life prompt: Announcing... What would be a big success that you would like someday to announce. Your wedding? Your book published? Your success in the X-Factor? Write the announcement, as an invitation or a press release.

Babies - and new life

This week's prompts are about babies - but on the understanding that babies aren't everybody's "thing" we will also be looking at the theme of New Life.

Even if you haven't had babies of your own, you will have had babies in your family, and with luck you'll even have some pictures of yourself when an infant. Babies are very photogenic and their photos generally make satisfying journal or scrapbook pages that everyone enjoys looking at.

If you’ve had a baby in the last twenty years you probably had an ultrasound. If you kept the picture – scrap it! I know mine wasn’t very good – you have to have a lot of imagination to see a baby in it! But she WAS there. And I was so overcome with seeing her that I went home and wrote a poem. If I could find it I would post it…

So the prompt for today is about expectations.

If you've had a baby - how did you feel when you were (or your wife/partner was) expecting? What were the feelings that went through your mind? If you had an ultrasound, how did that in particular make you feel?

New Life prompt: Expectations: what are your expectations in spring? With new growth in the landscape and all manner of new possibilities - what do you hope the spring and summer will bring?

Art - experiment

Art

Play with the word art in a creative way – cut out letters, use stamps. Create an ATC (Artist Trading Card). Use altered alphabets, mixed alpha stickers. Play with a word as a title… Just experiment!

To write, free associate starting with “art”.

An inspiration expedition

Go on an “inspiration expedition” or “artist’s date” as Julia Cameron refers to it - a date, on your own, with your inner artist, your "artist child", in a special place – your free permission to go to a craft shop or stationers. But it has to be a real place, not online. Or take your inner artist somewhere different – an art gallery, museum or stately home. Look at the art that is displayed there – has it anything to offer your creative self?

I saw these hanging in a health club and took a snap to remind me. I hope I can
capture what it was about them that inspired me...

Art question

Simple question to answer today

Is your writing, photography, scrapbooking an art or a craft? Why? Or why not?

ART is ...

Use the word ART as a writing or journalling prompt.

Give yourself ten minutes – set a timer or alarm if you can – and just keep your hand or fingers moving

If it helps, when you flag start again with one of these:

Art is . . .
The kind of art I like is . . .

I like art most when . . .

Art to me means . . .

It isn't art if it is . . .

Art inspiration: online gallery

Go to an art site and find a picture that inspires you.

Try:

The National Gallery
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/collection/default_online.htm

The Saatchi Gallery

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

http://www.metmuseum.org/

The Louvre

http://www.louvre.fr/

Now start journalling - either about why you like it or what you think it means, or about what is in the photo - if people, what are they doing? If a place, how does it feel to be there?

Artist inspiration

Is there a particular artist or crafter who has influenced you?

Who is it? Research a bit about their life and work, or just explain what you feel about their work.

Journalling: I have been inspired a lot by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I have used some of his designs as backing paper, I have bought stamps of his roses, and I have written a whole narrative story with his squares and roses as a theme. In some layouts, I have used an image from a Rennie Mackintosh calendar to cut out the letters for the titles.

Art & Books

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks
and all the sweet serenity of books ...
LONGFELLOW

This week the prompts are based around artistic inspiration.

What books have changed your life?
What was the last book you read?
Do books inspire creativity in you?

Journalling: I like to read inspirational scrapbooking and
cardmaking books, but as I become more experienced in papercraft and probably have developed more and more my own style, I find I get less and less out of these. But when I sit down and I don't know where to start, a glance through some books or magazines usually gives me enough inspiration to get started.

About me: nobody told me...

Nobody Told Me:

What did nobody tell you that you wished you had known?

What would you like to pass on to other people – your friends, your children, particularly - to save them grief?

Start with the prompt:

I wish someone had told me that ...

About me: how I felt...

How I felt

Find a photo of yourself on an important day such as last day of school, university graduation, your wedding photo, someone else’s wedding, a party, or a family occasion. Now write about how you remember feeling as compared to what you LOOK like you are feeling in the picture - do you feel you have accomplished anything that you were hoping to on that day?

About me: I'd rather...

I’d rather…

Life doesn’t always work out the way you’d like it to. Sometimes you yearn to be doing something else, being somewhere else, even being WITH someone else…

So - what would you rather do/be/have/say?

• I'd rather go to the dentist than have to face the hairdresser!


• I'd rather be with my family than with anyone else.


• I'd rather get up early and get on with stuff than lounge around in bed all morning wasting time
  


• I'd rather...

This is a great journalling prompt – I’d rather – see where it takes you!

About me: feelings

Write down a list of emotions

Here are a few to start you off:

amused,              angry,

anxious,             bored,

cautious,            cheerful,

confident,           confused,

delighted,           ecstatic,

embarrassed,         energetic,

frustrated,          happy,

hopeful,             jealous,

lonely,              sad,

surprised,           unperturbed,

valiant,             warm,

wise

Which emotions do you feel most often? Are you a soppy romantic? Are you jolly and optimistic? Me, I'm a glass half empty kind of girl, but despite caution being my middle name, I'd like to think I know how to enjoy myself!

Now pick a photo you took. Can remember your feelings when you took the picture. Why did you take the picture? What is the meaning behind it? What is there that someone else would not see and you would have to point out?

About me: stress

Stress

"There is no stress in the world, only people thinking stressful thoughts." -- Wayne Dyer

Something we do all face from time to time - stress!

What stresses you out most?
What stressful thoughts have dominated your thinking recently ?
What could you do to limit these thoughts and reduce the stress in your daily life?
Have you overcome stress in the past - how did you do it?

Journalling:
It's important to have both short-term and long-term ways to combat stress - and first of all, to be aware of one's own symptoms and triggers. Insomnia and illness are two of the big symptoms for me, and triggers include being out of control - lack of control over my work calendar, for example, or a stressful situation with a building project in the house which I can't seem to affect. Short-term ways to deal with stress include having a fragrant hot bath, chocolate (of course) and going to visit beautiful places.

About Me: milestones

Milestones

What are the milestones in your life?

When were you happiest, or felt most successful? When did you face a big change?

Why was it a milestone - how did you feel about it?

For me these might be:

• Going to secondary school
• the first time I made an audience laugh on-stage
• learning to play the guitar
• my first part-time job
• my first proper job – moving to London
• getting my first computer
• getting married
• having my first baby
• when my eldest started nursery school
• when my eldest left home!

What are your milestones? They are probably quite different. How many of them do you have accompanying photos or memorabilia for?

About Me: your life in literature

"When a person dies, a library is burned." -- Edmund White

It's either your favourite subject for writing and journalling about - or it's something you never touch - yourself! We'll come back to writing about yourself in future, but for now, here is a week's worth of prompts about writing about yourself. Today:

If your life were a book – what would be its title?

Jot down some possible chapter headings.

The most obvious are chronological – babyhood, childhood, nursery school, infant school etc. Create a timeline of your life so far.

What "family" means to you

Take some time to write about what the word "family" means to you.

What type of family do you have now? Do you have plans for the future?

What type of family did you grow up in?

Do you think “family” means something different than it did 50 years ago?

Family is such a key concept whether you're writing your own personal journal, creating a fiction, or writing a poem to touch the reader.

If you're like me you will have lots and lots of photos that fall under the heading "family". So take your time over this journalling, as it could be the foundation for many pages.

Family: Stories & sayings

Do you have any family sayings, words or phrases that are unique to yourselves, local dialect appropriated for your use, in-jokes and the like? These are great inspirations for a LO - write about how they came to be - or if you can't remember, just journal how these words are something that makes your family unique.

When I was a child, there is a family story about how, on a motoring trip, we got lost, the car bumped along smaller and smaller roads and eventually ended up at the end of a track with nowhere to go. Despite being less than two I got fed up with the adults' loud discussions about who got them lost and how they were to find their way out again, and insisted I would get out of the car and find the road. Amused, they let me out and off I toddled determinedly.

Family recipes

What kind of food do you and your family love?

Is food important to you, do you have special meals, or eat out on special occasions?

Does your family have any special recipes? Take a picture, write them down, lay the recipe out nicely on the computer... the recipe is journalling in itself, but also mention the connections that the food has with your family life.

Why not try creating your own family recipe scrapbook?

We try most years - setting fire to the Christmas pudding. It was only one year we had significant success - 2006. You could clearly see the blue flame, and it was a disappointment that the photo didn't show it up! But Photoshop came to the rescue... and made the photo look like the real thing...

Family: funny stories and incidents

Do you have any funny stories or incidents from your family history? Sometimes family life is hard, but there must be lots of times you’ve laughed together!

If it helps, start with:

How we laughed when ...

Family: Nicknames

Did you have any nicknames in your family when you were a child, or for your own children?

Our nickname for our daughter when first born is probably unrepeatable! (Whisper: turbopooper)

Write about how the nickname came to be.

This is a great example from Marie in Australia

Mouldywarps

My brother and youngest sister were, for some reason, known as the "Mouldywarps". There were four of us, so we split into pairs, the two older ones - the "girls" - and the two younger ones. Mouldywarp is apparently a dialect word for mole (though I must admit I always thought the Mouldywarp was a mole CATCHER)

What's odd is that in the next generation my son was fascinated by moles. It must be something about the boys in my family... With my son it was because of the story One Snowy Night by Nick Butterworth - you'll have to read it to find out why! He has a much loved mole puppet or two and several mole china figures (Molennium...)

In E. Nesbitt's The House of Arden a contemporary boy, Edred, must be tested before he can become Lord Arden and restore the family fortunes. He meets the Mouldiwarp (a mole who appears on the family coat-of-arms).

Perhaps there are more mouldywarps around than I realised! But there isn't yet (at time of writing) a Wikipedia article about it.

Family: the ones you love

Time to think about what I do to make life special for my special man.

How do I love thee?

Let me count the ways...
Christina Rossetti (originally Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Think of someone one you love: set down the reasons why you love them, the things about them that you love. Count the ways... here are some prompts to get you started.

I love the way you...
I love it when you...
My favourite part of your face is...
Your smile makes me ...
I love your ...
You're a great husband because ...
I'm so glad you ...

Family: family traditions

The theme for the week starting April 8th is Family

Family traditions

Do you have any special family traditions for seasons of the year or special occasions like birthdays?

Often we remember or are reminded to journal about Christmas traditions, but there are probably lots of other occasions and traditions that you remember from your own childhood or that your family now practice.

For example, we’ve just had Easter. What did you do then, that was special to you?

Here is my Easter journalling about a family tradition:

Anna did a little egg hunt at Easter. It’s a tradition in our family that the Easter Bird comes over from France to leave little eggs. Much more believable – let’s face it, bunnies don’t lay eggs! She found one egg behind the photo of her cousin of the same name.

My favourite music makes me feel...

Listen to your favourite music with your eyes shut.

• How does it make you feel?
• What does it remind you of?

When the music stops, open your eyes and write or type for 5 minutes (you could set a timer or alarm or just check your computer’s clock).

Writing for a fixed length of time like this is called freewriting and it’s a very useful journalling exercise. The rules are: start with the prompt, don’t stop and keep your fingers/pen moving for the full 5 minutes.

You can carry on after 5 minutes if you have found your flow!

For scrapbookers, this can be a useful exercise if there was a soundtrack to the photo you are scrapping - if it was an occasion with a special song, such as a wedding, or a particular time. If you have a photo from 1983, for example, try to listen to pop music from that era and see if it helps you put the photo in context...

The song that's stuck in your head...

Sometimes, when I find a new song, I play it again and again. I just can’t get enough of it.

And you know when a song gets stuck in your head? Those lyrics just dominate your thoughts! When something affects you as strongly as this, write those lyrics down.

• Think about what the lyrics are saying and why they mean something to you
• Write another verse for the song
• Take the title of the song and just freewrite – see what other thoughts, emotions and phrases come out when you think about just that title

Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it

from "Losing my religion" by REM

Journalling: I do try to keep up with myself a lot. I don't need anyone to keep up with, there's no "keeping up with the Joneses". I drive myself, sometimes past my strength and past the sensible point. I work too hard, and try to fit too much in, and to be a great wife and mother, and I'm always trying to be a better person... Just now I am suffering the consequences of this. Driving myself to work so hard - and I've been ill for over a month. I didn't spend enough time on myself keeping fit and healthy. I hope I've learned my lesson and I won't do it again...

Music as a theme tune

Two prompts today:

What's your favourite theme tune from a TV programme or film?

If your life was a television show, what would your theme song be and why?

Mine changes frequently ... I still love the song by Annie Lennox at the end of Lord of the Rings: Into the West - it makes shivers go down my spine. And it has an ethereal quality that might be appropriate - and it is about sleep! Sleep now and have wonderful dreams ...

My favourite music

Simple one today:

• What is your favourite piece of music? Why?

Your scrapbook layout or sketchbook journal could feature a photo of the musician, or a scan of the lyrics or music or CD/album cover. Or you could write or print out the lyrics in an attractive font.

Writing and journalling about music

Who is your favourite band?

Collect as many titles of their singles, albums and album tracks as you can and create a piece of writing using them.

Writing or journalling about music - send a letter

Today's music-related prompt:

Write a letter to your favourite band or musician and thank them for their music (don’t be too soppy – treat them as real people) or suggest some songs which you would like to hear them cover!

Writing and journalling about music - acrostic poem

Still being inspired by the name of your favourite band or musician or even composer, why not write an acrostic poem to accompany a photo of them?

Don't worry if you've never written a poem before: an acrostic poem DOES NOT have to rhyme :) It's simple - you take the word and use each letter as the first letter of a line of a poem.

So Green Day would come out:

G ...
R ...
E ...
E ...
N ...
D ...
A ...
Y ...

The obvious subject for your acrostic would be music or why you like this person/band.

Good Riddance they sing
Remembering the "Time of Your Life"
Even I can relate to that
Especially when September Ends
Normally my favourite month
Dreaming I hear them singing it
At the front of the concert audience
Yelling in delight