Journaling

Have you ever added up the value of all those little bits and pieces you've bought and collected, and which are laying around your work area or hidden away? Frightening! I daren't. I could have owned an extra house by now.

I'm sure I'll continue to be unable to resist temptation everytime I go near a shop, but I really need to slow down buying stuff.

In the past I've tried to follow all the latest and greatest scrapbooking ideas and trends, added all the new embellishments but ended up with pages that looked 'sort of good' - but a bit like everyone else's, and felt 'I really want pages uniquely my own'.

Fortunately, I've learnt many papercraft skills from the best over 30 years or more, and so I'm trying to incorporate my own handmade paper, cut my own rubber stamps, create special backgrounds, use calligraphy for titles, and much more.

In future posts in this blog I'll describe my techniques and show some of the things I've been creating. My friends say they like them - but the most important thing is that I like them and have lots of fun - and I hope you will too. (And I'm not spending as much.)

I'm pretty new to blogging, and I've still to find easy ways of putting up pictures of some pages.

Hopefully you'll keep coming back to this blog - I'll have lots to show you soon.

This is not quite scrapbooking - but it's a piece of my calligraphy. I hope you like the saying it's my favorite. This is my simplest way of laying out a journaling page. The story is true. It was told me a shopkeeper (Malcolm). In the end I hope to bind together whole series of stories illustrated like this, but I haven't decided if they really need extra embellishment or not.

Here's the story, so you can read it:

Gerry was getting old, but he planned to build a room under his house, so that he and his mates could play pool. He had been digging out soil with a pick and shovel for months, and he was exhausted. When Malcolm, and his new employee, Paul, had finished using their excavator to create a new driveway for the neighbors, Gerry asked Malcolm if the two of them could finish levelling the floor for him with their machine.

"Sure, Old Fella!'" said Malcolm, and he and Paul spent half a day getting it just perfect.

"How much are you going to charge him for that?" asked Paul.

"Nothin'"

"You must be crazy! You'll go broke in no-time!"

"What goes around, comes around!" replied Malcolm, and away they drove.

Two days later Malcolm and Paul were at another job, demolishing a retaining wall, and had a truck-load of soil and concrete to dump. Malcolm sent Paul off with the truck and a hundred dollars to pay the tip-fees.

When Paul returned, he told Malcolm that the man on the gate had taken one look at the name on the side of the truck and let him through without paying. "I know what you did for old Gerry, who lives opposite me!" he said.

"I told you 'What goes around, comes around'!"

Malcolm and Paul continued to be waved through the tip gate, free of charge, for the rest of the time that the same man worked there. Malcolm reckoned his small deed of kindness ended up saving him over twenty thousand dollars.

Take care and have a good weekend.

Pet

PS I've got a friend called Marg who's fantastic at journaling. And scrapbooking. We started blogging at the same time. If you want some great journaling tips, and other useful scrapbooking information, you may like to follow her blog as well. You'll find it at

http://www.scrapjournal.blogspot.com/

.... well, at least, I hope you'll come back to mine.

If you want to put mine into your 'My Yahoo' or feedreader, so you get it automatically, it's

http://best-scrapbooking-ideas.blogspot.com/atom.xml

technorati tags:Scrapbooking, idea, calligraphy, papercrafts, journaling