Journaling on my scrapbook pages

I have a confession about the journaling on my scrapbook pages that I hinted on Wednesday that I was going to share… I don’t like my handwriting!

Here’s the picture from the last post that started this off… it shows my friend Pat, who sat next to me at the last NJ Crop Weekend.

My friend Pat at the Fall 2011 NJ Crop Weekend

And do you see the scrapbook page about San Antonio that was in progress
at the foreground of the picture?  I was working on our Texas vacation pictures
that weekend.  Here’s how the following set of the finished pages turned out:

San Antonio pages

I used a variety of the Spice Cake Designer Series Paper, since the  colors really seemed to match the subject – and of course they are all color coordinated with each other and with the Stampin’ Up! cardstock and ink colors, making life really easy for me to piece together this quilt style scrapping!  I added strips of the 3/8″ Quilted Satin Ribbon to separate the rectangles on the page.  I love how it came out!

But here’s the confession that I want to point out about pages – notice the journaling that I hand wrote on the bottom right.  I have to tell you that I really, really do not like my own handwriting.  This is not an issue when I do a lot of my scrapbooking in My Digital Studio and just type my journaling messages.  But, when I do paper scrapping, I make myself hand write it – for many reasons:

1. I find that I can wind up spending TOO much time on a set of pages
   if I get too crazy making the journaling look perfect.  I get involved with creating a document to type the journaling, then worry about the size and shape it will wind up to be, the font size, alignment and so on…
2. Focusing on the appearance of the journaling makes me lose track of what I am actually saying – kind of a form over function thing, I guess!
3. I also think it is really important to make the pages more “organic” and accessible by including the personal touch of my own handwriting.
4. Our writing changes over time, and years from now it will be great to look back on these pages and see what it looked like now!

Now don’t get me wrong – there are some times when I am doing a hand made page, and I will go to My Digital Studio and print out a title in the correct matching color for the page… but I no longer go out of my way to omit my handwriting from journaling on my scrapbook pages!