What is it about food that brings back so many memories? When I think about special moments from my life, so many of them are tied to cooking or eating. Those precious moments are perfect to document in your scrapbooks. While your family might not be able to taste that special recipe again, they will always remember the way they felt in that moment. Baking a special cookie recipe with my grandmother, taking my boys out for their first ice cream cone, and pulling my first Thanksgiving turkey out of the oven are just a few on the memories I have that are tied to food. I can remember my feelings so easily in those moments because all my senses were working at the same time.

One of my favorite food traditions is our Friday night pizza. I make homemade pizza dough and then my boys and my husband make and bake the pizzas. It’s a little thing, but is a tradition that is so special to our family. I hope that when my boys are grown with families of their own, that they will carry on the same kinds of traditions with their own children.

Scrapbooking is also a great way to save the special recipes passed down through your family. I have a few recipes written in my grandmother’s handwriting that I have turned into layouts that will become family recipe books to share with my loved ones. Looking over those recipes transports me right back to her kitchen as a little girl, helping her roll out snickerdoodles or make lasagne.

This month, I want to encourage you to savor your delicious memories by scrapbooking a favorite memory tied to food. I am hosting a challenge over on the forums at The Digital Press and would love for you to come play along. All you have to do is scrap about a favorite recipe, food tradition, or simply a layout about food. I can’t wait to see all the delicious layouts you come up with!

About the Author: Katie is a member of the Creative Team here at The Digital Press. She lives in Central Florida with her husband and their four sweet but crazy boys. When she’s not dodging Nerf bullets or trying to dig out from under the never ending pile of laundry, she enjoys photography, cooking, going to Disney World with her family, and, of course, digital scrapbooking.

This is my favorite time of the year, as the temperatures cool, the air feels crisp and clean, the birds are plentiful at our suet feeder, and the leaves start to change color. What a wonderful time of the year it is to get outdoors, go for a walk and even better, bring your camera to take some photos of the local scenery.  I will often park my car on the side of the road when passing a particular eye-catching view and snap a pic of it with my phone or my small mirrorless camera which I often keep in my purse.  For the photo in this layout, I knew the quality of the photo wouldn’t be exceptional but the memory it evokes is what I was after.  This was in Northern BC, while driving by on a tour bus.  I snapped this shot through the window.

Fall is such a sensory experience, with the smells, the taste, and the visual impact of the changing environment. Take a photo as you stroll through your neightborhood or visit a local park. Just get outdoors and experience the changing season. Fall makes me think of hot chocolate, orange, yellow and red colors, pumpkin spice latte’s, morning fog, swirling leaves in the wind, and one of the best things, for me, is that it becomes sweater weather! I love to wear my sweaters (I have a lot LOL)! In fact, I think I need to get a photo of myself outside, wearing one of my sweaters, with the fall colors around me. I’m glad I have a selfie stick. I think I’ll do this later today and then create a page about my love of sweaters.

For the photo of this layout, I was at the corner of our street, walking up the walkway to the bridge. (I’m lucky enough to live across from a river.)

Fall might look and feel different for you, depending on what region you live in. Why not scrap a layout about what fall is like in your neighborhood, sharing what you see in your neck of the woods.

Head on over to the challenge forum and check out this months’ challenges including my challenge!  Hope you participate and I look forward to to seeing what fall looks like in your neighborhood.

Rae is part of the design team at The Digital Press and has been a scrapbooker and photographer for many years, living on the west coast, with her hubby and labradoodle, Taz. She’s addicted to chocolate, TV shows and books!

Like many people, when I first stumbled across the world of scrapping, I was very much an “event scrapper.” I began by working my way through my photographs chronologically, making pages that mainly focused on the date and place. On a good day, I might also describe what we were doing there in my journaling.

Don’t worry, though… today I’m not going to subject you to my earliest layouts!

As time progressed and I settled more into this new hobby,  I worked out how to add shadows that didn’t look terrible, and went through the phase of painstakingly adding a bit of string curled around some elements… and I eventually decided that the journaling is now the most important part of my layout. As such, I began to change my style of writing.

These days, I’m much more likely to write about what I (or a member of my family, even) was thinking or feeling than about the bare bones of “who, what, where.”

I’d like to show you a layout that I’ve just recently completed, based on a photo I took of my girls on a walk in the countryside near where we live. I used the kit Beautiful Life by River~Rose…

We go walking most weekends, so I could easily have an album full of similar layouts… but I preferred to pick out a slightly different theme. This time, when I looked at this photo, it came to me that I’m so glad we can still walk together as a family. That was a feeling definitely worth savoring! So that was where I focused my journaling.

Another layout that I’ve done recently is about my husband’s favorite pastime. Again, it’s something that happens all the time — so I’ve chosen to generalize about the activity rather than write about one particular trip to the beach. I used Sahin Design’s beautiful Monochrome Fall collection for this page…

As you can see, it’s not always necessary to scrap every instance of an event in our lives, chronologically… but instead, you can record your memories through the capture of generalized ideas, themes, or events. This is a great way to savor the moment now, while recording it for the future.

Don’t forget to head over to the challenge forum to take part in today’s challenge and savor your own special moment!

About the Author: Jude is part of the Creative Team at The Digital Press. She lives in the UK with her husband and two fantastic girls. She loves traveling, would be off in her campervan every weekend if she could get away with it, and loves time spent exploring new places and trying new experiences (and photographing them!). She also spends too much time on the computer, and still doesn’t go running as often as she says she’s going to.

Personality is one of the most telling things about us – it demonstrates the differences in the way we each think, feel and behave. Understanding someone’s personality can help you better understand who someone is and how they view the world. I recently listened to a podcast about the Myers Briggs personality types and it got me thinking about how great it might be to create some scrapbook pages that center around personality types and traits.

I dug into my paperwork and found some of the various personality tests I’ve taken over the years to help me determine what approach to take in creating a personality based page. I decided to focus my page on my StrengthsFinder results and here is the final page which outlines the top 5 themes resulting from my assessment. I think this layout represents a really interesting look into who I am and how I react to the world.

There are a lot of ways to assess personality types that don’t require expensive tests. I’ll outline just a few below in case it’s interesting to you. You can easily use any of the results you might find about your personality (or the personalities of your friends and family) to create so many different pages!

1. The StrengthsFinder test can be taken by purchasing a copy of the book StrengthsFinder 2.o which allows you to take the assessment as well as access a wealth of information about the various themes.
2. The Myers-Briggs test is a common test that most people have heard of which ultimately identifies which personality type (of 16 standard types) that you might have. There are a number of online options that will allow you to identify your Myers Brigges type for free. One that I’ve used with success is 16 Personalities.
3. Others I’ve seen online include See My Personality, Personality Assessor, and Psych Central Personality Test. I am sure a quick google search could offer you thousands of other options!

In addition to using specific personality measures to document personality on your scrapbook pages, you can also just make an effort to create more pages that tell the stories behind the various personalities among your family and friends. The personalities of the people you care about can tell the world a lot about who you are and what kinds of people you like to surround yourself with in life.

Here are a few ideas that might help you as you try to add more personality traits on your pages:

1. Use word art pieces to identify the traits that you see in yourself or a friend for a visually interesting scrapbook page.
2. Choose one personality trait about someone and focus all of your journaling on that particular trait and how it makes them who they are!
3. Compare multiple people’s personality types or traits on one page. This would be a perfect way to compare and contrast your immediate family’s various personalities.
4. Use colors on your page that reinforce the primary ‘feel’ of the persons personality (for example, using bright colors for happy go lucky, pink for sweetness, purple for ambition, and blue for loyal).
5. Ask yourself what elements, patterns, colors and shapes come to mind when you think of a particular person. That can help guide you to reinforce the page with things that remind you of them!

OK, I hope you’re feeling inspired to create some pages about your personality and the personalities in your life! So, now it’s your turn! I would love to see what you can do to document personality by creating a scrapbook page that tells the story of someone’s personality type or traits.  I’m hosting a challenge over on the forums and I hope you will come play along!  Check it out at The Drawing Board: Challenges.

About the Author: Amy lives in Reston, VA with her husband of 14 years and their 10 year old boy/girl twins. Their 19 year old daughter has just started her third year at West Virginia University!  Amy has been scrapbooking since the early 1990s but discovered digital scrapbooking in 2005 when her twins were born and has primarily scrapped digitally since that time. She is passionate about telling her family’s stories and documenting their life together! Amy is a huge reader (mostly literary fiction) and is a pop culture junkie! She also LOVES all things beauty & makeup!