Pixel and Paper Series - Stacy Julian

The Pixel and Paper Series highlights digital techniques and products for scrapbookers like you and me. I believe that everyone should consider digital elements to be a part of their scrapbooking toolbox, so let’s learn together what the possibilities are. Each week, I’ll be sharing the opinion of a real-life scrapbooker to reveal how they use digital in their scrapbooking. Each post will also offer a freebie download to help you get started on your pixel and paper journey. Enjoy!

Introducing… Stacy Julian

If you’ve been into scrapbooking for a while, I’m sure you have heard of Stacy Julian. She was the editor of Simple Scrapbooks magazine, creator of the Library of Memories system and founded Big Picture Classes – a thriving and amazing community of scrapbookers learning and sharing together online.

I’ve taken many classes at BPC and love all my experiences. It’s great to be able to connect with a nice community of creatives, no matter where in the world you live. There’s also such a variety of classes to choose from, so I’m never without inspiration to scrapbook. From workshops to self-paced classes, there’s a huge fountain of ideas to draw from.

I think that the impact Stacy has made on the community of scrapbooking is that of storytelling. It’s about getting our stories recorded, not about product or the latest technique necessarily. No doubt, she has affected so many of us and continues to inspire with new ideas and projects. I’m always grateful by how much she shares through her blog and on various Paperclipping Roundtable podcasts…

Stacy says:

Like you, I feel that paper and digital are simply tools or means to an end. The end is storytelling. We have an opportunity to pay attention to our lives, to feel gratitude for the many and varied opportunities we have during our relatively short sojourn on earth.

I have found that taking pictures and then learning to live with those pictures is one the very BEST things I can do to stay positive and remind myself of the goodness that surrounds me.

We live in a wonderful digital age that allows us to enjoy, share and use our photos in unprecedented ways. I champion anyone who loves pictures and wants to cherish them and add lasting value to them, by attaching personal perspective in the form of words!

Whether this is done solely on a computer or in a more traditional way with paper and paste is not important to me. I think what is exciting is that women have found a comfortable place to practice this wonderful hobby of scrapbooking.

Some women are comfortable with pixels and some women are comfortable with paper — isn’t that awesome?! With comfort, comes confidence and hopefully, confidence gives way to curiosity. Curiosity feeds creativity and the most creative people actually seek out novel experiences. They like to try new things, because something new always feels exciting!

So the trick (I think) is to find your comfort zone, grow confident there and then follow your curiosities into new spaces that will keep your passion alive and your commitment strong.

My computer is definitely my friend and I use it a LOT to type out longer stories that I add to traditional pages. I am also faithful with my time-tested digital workflow — without my photo software I couldn’t organize or prioritize my digital images in the way that I do.

It’s About Storytelling

No doubt the point Stacy is trying to make is that digital tools are amazing and fabulous, but just another element to help us get to our end goal. It’s all about telling your story and recording your precious memories. That is the real importance of it all, not so much the labels or tools or specific aesthetic choices we make.

via Stacy’s blog

I really love how open Stacy is to considering so many different forms of memory keeping as scrapbooking. These days, many of us blog and instagram… and isn’t that a form of scrapbooking in itself?

It goes to show how broad this term “scrapbooking” can go. It’s no longer that stereotypical image of a grandma putting clippings in a giant book!

Try It For Yourself

In the spirit of storytelling and anything goes, I decided to great some square graphical cards that would match up well with square photos, the latest for Instagram-ers especially. With all the new ways of memory keeping, let’s think about using technology to help us on our journey. Ultimately the medium isn’t the point, rather the story you want to tell and the memories you want to keep.