Hey ladies! I know that journaling is something that many scrappers struggle with. And yet to me it’s the main reason for scrapping: to tell a story, to remember the moment and the feelings. My job is to write 95% of the time, so my “writing muscle” is strong and always ready to get to work, but I can understand how difficult and overwhelming the idea of journaling can be when your muscle isn’t as strong as mine. So let’s flex and stretch and build up your writing muscle together, shall we? Here are some journaling techniques you can use to help you tell your story even when you feel uncomfortable writing.

• Answer to the “Five Ws and One H” that journalists use. Those questions are interesting because you have to elaborate somehow, you can’t just answer them with yes or no! You can talk about facts (what happened?) or about feelings (what emotions did you feel?), and of course you can pick and choose which questions to answer!
  • What?
  • Who?
  • When?
  • Where?
  • Why?
  • How?

On this LO, Corrin added the When (date on upper corner), the Who (kids’ names) and the What with lots of details!

• “Talk” to someone. It’s hard to express ourselves “on our own”, but if we write to someone like we would talk to them during a conversation, it becomes much easier. Try talking to the person your page is about, telling them why you decided to scrap this story, why you love this or that in them, why they make you go nuts with this habit of theirs. Try writing to someone that is gone, or that isn’t here yet. Write to someone you admire, a fictional character, an historical figure. You could even write to your pet or to a thing! “Dear Netflix,…”

What a touching “letter” Heidi wrote to her dad! Sweet!!

• Use someone else’s words. If you’re not confident enough to journal from scratch, why not “borrow” someone else’s words: a song, a poem, lines from your favorite book or movie, a quote.
• Use wordbits or wordart. Our beloved designers work hard to provide us with beautiful kits, but often those products are also terrific tools to help us tell our story. Let those elements be your journaling or inspire words of your own!

Here the wordart is used by Shivani both as a title and a starting point for the journaling!

• If you feel comfortable writing but not sharing your journaling, you can easily hide it when you create the web version of your LO: delete it, blur it, add paint on top of it, blend it into the paper until it’s unreadable… There are lots of ways to keep it secret!

On this LO I could easy have blended the journaling even more to make it unreadable if I wanted to keep it a secret!

I hope those few tips will help you overcome your fears or awkwardness towards journaling! If you need an extra push to try it, why not join this month’s journaling challenge hosted by Amy?

About the author  Chloé is in charge of PR and communication for her small town by day, is a digiscrapper “by night,” and a photographer whenever the light is beautiful. She lives with her man and fur-babies in a small town of Alsace (in the northeast of France), where she loves to read, watch good TV shows (TWD being her absolute favorite), and just hang out with her friends — no matter if they are close by, online, or away in her Swiss hometown. She recently became quite obsessed with her BuJo (bullet journal) and can’t wait to discover how much it’ll help her improve her (so far non-existent!) organisational skills!

Hello and welcome to another Tutorial Tuesday from The Digital Press! I don’t know about you, but I love, love, love all the pretty, swirly, quirky, office-y, bold, simple and all other kinds of fonts that are around (and often free!) in digiland. I have to admit I have bunches of them that I loved the look of, and downloaded, but have never used because I tend to stick with a few old favourites. Are you a bit like me? Well this tutorial is all about how to mix, or combine fonts – in the hope that perhaps you and I will go on to use a few more of the pretty fonts that we have stashed away, gathering digital dust in on their virtual shelves!

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to combining fonts, just like everything else, if it looks good to you, then it is good! But there are a few guidelines to help if you want to mix and match your fonts.

Before we get the those guidelines though, it is good to know what the different font types are:
Serif — these fonts have little lines at the end of each stroke (so at the beginning and end of the s, at the top and the bottom of i etc).
Sans serif — these fonts DON’T have those little lines at the end of each stroke! (The font you are reading right now, the main text of this tutorial, is written with in a sans serif font).
Script — these fonts are based on handwriting, and tend to look more casual than the serif and sans serif fonts.

Different fonts can help to create a different character for your pages, and when used well, they can give you a brilliant title, inviting journaling and clear notation of the facts (like when and where your event occurred).

Here are the 3 most helpful guidelines that I found…

1. 2 could be the magic number! Most pages can be improved by using more than one font, but few pages will be improved by using more than 3.

2. Contrast is key! When combining fonts, try looking for fonts that have plenty of contrast. For example, if you have used a tall and thin sans serif font, try pairing it with a shorter or rounder scripty font.

3. Size matters! Pay attention to the size of your fonts. If you are creating a title, you might want to have one focus word bigger than the rest. Titles are also usually larger than the main body of journaling. When thinking about your journaling font, remember that some fonts are easy to read even when they are quite small (serif, or sans serif fonts for example), while some fonts can be quite difficult to read if they are small (script fonts tend to be more difficult to read in small sizes). You can try adjusting the font size, or the spaces between the lines (called leading), or even the space between each letter (called kerning).

So, putting all these guidlelines to work, I made this page! You can see that I went for 3 fonts (2 in the title, and 1 for the journaling and date). I used a script font (“Sunshine in my soul” – seen in red) and a serif font (this is actually an alpha from Project Grateful – Crisp, which is the collection I used to make my layout) for the title, and then I stuck with a popular and easy to read sans serif  font (“Century Gothic”) for the journaling and date.

So there you have it! I hope you have found this helpful, and if you know you have some great fonts, but haven’t used them much yet because you need a little help organising your fonts, Carolyn (Amson) recently wrote a blog post all about a way to help organise your fonts so they are easily accessible next time you want to try using some of them! That tutorial can be found here: Easy Font Management.

About the Author  Corrin is on the creative team here at The Digital Press. She is a fan of the Big Bang Theory and a lover of cozy pajamas. She lives in the breezy South of England with her husband and 4 crazy kids, who regularly discover & plunder her secret chocolate stashes! She is still trying to get the house straight after moving nearly 3 years ago. Who knows… maybe this will be the year she reaches the bottom of the laundry pile!