I love compiling photographs and I’m the type who likes to keep concert tickets, boarding passes and the tags that come with the gifts I receive. When I was in grade school until I became a teenager, I diligently kept scrapbooks and a big wooden chest where I stored memorabilia. But as I grew older and busier with “real life,” I had slackened in my memory keeping and instead of meticulously laying out photos and souvenir in albums, I just dumped them in a box. There even came a time when I just grew tired of all the”junk” I had collected and threw a bunch of them out. I just didn’t have the time or the drive to scrapbook anymore.
But when I got married and eventually became a Mom, the desire to record all our happy moments in a more tangible way gradually came back. So I started scrapbooking again, mostly for the events revolving around my kids, such as baptisms and birthdays, even first haircuts.
However, I still haven’t been very diligent. So a lot of these things are still dumped in a box. I’ve just been waiting to get inspired.
Then early this year, I met the girls behind Life Documented Manila at an art exhibit where they told me a little about what they do and this new way of scrapbooking. Not long after that, my sister in law, Martine De Luna, attended one of their workshops and showed me the memory binder she had started putting together with them. It interested me very much cause I thought the stuff were really cute and it seemed much easier than the old way of scrapbooking which I was used to. From Martine’s experience, it also sounded like a fun thing to do in a group setting.
So finally, I decided to try it out and last Saturday morning, I attended a memory keeping workshop by Life Documented Manila in partnership with Make It Blissful.
The workshop started out with Martine giving a short introduction and then she introduced Pinky and Yam, the girls running Life Documented Manila. They talked about scrapbooking and how this movement of theirs came about. It was very interesting to listen to their stories and what they had to say. I don’t think I’ve ever actually met people so knowledgeable about this particular craft. It is obviously something they are very passionate about so hearing them speak about it, while they showed their personal binders, made me want to go back in time and document all my meaningful moments as diligently and creatively as they have done.
After explaining how to get started and how to use the materials, they distributed the starter kits to the participants, 18 of us in all, and then the magical memory keeping began.
Each starter kit contained a Simple Stories 6×8″ binder with ten page protectors inside and a set of 120 Project Life cards in different colors and prints, all of them very pretty! We had to choose the design we wanted upon registration. I chose a green binder and the theme, Sunshine, for my cards. We were also asked to bring prints of the photos we wanted to document but Canon Pixma Philippines was also there, ready to print more photos for us.
I chose to scrapbook about my 30th birthday last March and my first kid-free vacation with Kayo, because these were events I never got to blog about. They happened during my first trimester when I was feeling too sick and lousy to do crafts or even journal. Those were precious moments I just had to revisit and document.
I was quite overwhelmed at first. I didn’t know where to start. So I approached it as the layout artist that I am and for each spread, decided on the color, the flow and the composition before putting in the extra stuff, like the captions, short journal entries and embellishments.
Speaking of embellishment, the LDM team wowed everyone with the spread of craft materials they had prepared on a table for all of us to make use of throughout the workshop. There were scrapbooking paper in assorted colors and patterns, washi tape, alphabet stickers, rubber stamps and, my new favorite tool, acrylic stamps in hundreds of different designs!
Life Documented came out with a set of pretty cards exclusively for this workshop’s attendees.
Me and my seat mates, Sam and Fhely at the workshop
And I was right, memory keeping is the kind of thing that is usually done alone but is much more fun when done with others. I didn’t get to finish my spreads, not even halfway, but it was an amazing jumpstart to it. It was also really nice to see what the other participants have put together.
I’ve been working on my scrapbooking since the workshop last Saturday and I’ve already planned on the other events I would like to document next. I realize I have more then enough material to use from the workshop to last me a few months!
It’s so much fun and also a lot more practical than the old way of scrapbooking. I’m really happy I decided to join and I look forward to sharing these documented memories with loved ones, specially with my children who are growing up quite fast.
Thank you Life Documented Manila and Make It Blissful for the wonderful time of memory keeping and for helping rekindle my love for scrapbooking! I hope I can sit with you ladies again so we can share our lives with each other through words, pictures and pretty paper. 🙂
For more information about Life Documented Manila and to sign up for their future workshops, please visit www.lifedocumentedmanila.com. You may also follow them on Instagram for some scrapbooking inspiration.
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