would you say you do WITHOUT some sort of journaling on them? Even if it just a paragraph or two? I have noticed lately that I add journaling to just about every layout I have done. (ok and also how do you spell the word journalling? Because if I spell it with two L's it is underlined red but if I change it to one L it is still saying it misspelled. Is it not a word? LOL)

I guess that second question isn't really important I am just wondering if you find yourself adding journalling more to your layout now or have you always included it? I can look back at early layouts and see there is less of it then the most current ones for me.

LOL @ the spelling. I always spell it with one l because "journalling" just looks wrong to me for some reason. I think of it as a word that is in the same spelling vein as other action verbs like "traveling"(yay!) vs. "travelling" (boo!). But I've noticed too that it's really not a word that dictionaries like. LOL!! It could very well have been made up by the scrapbooking industry. Just like "scrapbooking"...my spell checks never like that one either. It's like it doesn't see them as verby and what not. (p.s. verby is also not a word).

As for journaling...I will say that once upon a time I didn't journal very much. It was more of an afterthought...so some of my pages didn't have any journaling at all. Here's my first digital page (and I can't believe I'm about to dredge up a page this old and this horrible):



And there's others..like these (ew):







BUT...there were glimpses of the story in there from the very start too. This is my third page ever digitally scrapped. So it's also dreadful, but it's FULL of story.



Mostly I think that in the very beginning I was focusing on learning my program, getting confident in the digital medium and falling in love with the community. It wasn't long before I was scrapping the story regularly though. You can see in my gallery that I regularly journaled beginning around month 3 of my digiscrapping evolution and it increased more and more over time. But still, even then it wasn't *quite* like I do now. My scrapping was a little more product, creative team driven. Sooo..while I loved to include the story in journaling, it still was second, if that makes sense.

Then, I had a coming to The Story moment. I realized that the pages I loved most...and the ones that mattered more to my loved ones (and to me!)..were the ones where I shared my feelings and thoughts in *words* and not just in images and design.

And now..I'm like you. Can't scrap a page without journaling without it feeling totally foreign and naked to me.

OMGosh if you could just see some of my earliest pages. They are HORRIBLE!! Either I did not shadow anything or I made it look like it was floating somewhere in outer space LOL. But I have to say your answer cracked me up on whether journaling is a word and how to spell it. I do still have the occasional page without journaling but its rare. I honestly think finding GWL was what really prompted me to journal more. I still like the page to be pretty and love embellishments but really like for the story to be told

I'm still very new to scrapbooking, so I think that I have been focused on learnign my program and trying to understand design (I wonder if I'll ever understand design). But now that I feel more comfortable with PSE and have found the wonder of templates (and don't feel guilty for using them because some digiscrappers I highly admire use them all the time), I have started journalling more. As a memory keeper, I feel it's important for me to learn how to tell the story behind the picture. I'm really looking forward to the Staycation class so that I can improve my story telling.

And I can't resist chiming in on the journalling/journaling - I think it comes from the noun , the place where one would journal. So it's not recoginzed as a valid word. *shrugs* So I guess we get to make up our own conventions. I have to agree I like the way "journaling" looks when written, but I use "journalling" at times, too. It's kinda fun to have a word that can go both ways.

Hahaha, my earlier pages didn't even put a date on the photo (I'm so bad with that even now). I think I only started journaling when I had a specific story to tell. Eventually I became very conscious of journaling (yeah to me it looks better with one L) and now it's hard for me to NOT journal, lol. I'd say about 80% of my pages have journaling.

Sometimes I'm really in just a mood to make a pretty page, so I'll just chuck in a quote or sentence.