Stargazer {confetti}
Papyrus {October}
{fresh seeds} Olive Tree
“Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.”
That’s one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption which is an adaptation of one of the greatest pieces of storytelling ever penned (in my humble opinion) Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King.
I think I’m so drawn to this story because of it’s strong and impactful theme of Hope. It’s one that resonates with me as it echoes one of my personal truths and strongest held beliefs: Hope is the single greatest asset a person can have.
There is a special kind of power in hope. The kind of quiet, steady, power that lives in perseverance, in faithfulness, in sunny days after cloudy ones, and in joyfulness.
And it’s the stories of hope, springing fresh that have inspired Olive Tree. Olive Tree was first made available to subscribers of the My Scrapbook Art newsletter during my feature there in March 2012 and I’ve now I’ve revamped it a bit and brought it home to The Lilypad.
Meet Olive Tree:
Olive Tree is a full digital kit inspired by these stories of fresh hope and finding joys and it is my hope that it will inspire you to document your own story of hopefulness, of wishing, or of joy. Whether you are documenting these days and stories for your child(ren) or for yourself (and please do!), Olive Tree features hand-crafted crafty goodness with a heart for the hopeful story. And it is versatile enough to help you tell any story, for any age and any gender.
I just love the fabulous inspiration created with Olive Tree. The pages created are just.so.pretty.
And Olive Tree is available in my shoppe for 50% off as part of The Lilypad’s Something Old, Something New this week! Which means you can snag it for 50% off today — Wednesday 30 May — only.
As always I looove to see your stories and art too, so please feel free to share with me anytime. Really! Just shoot me a mail or share them on my facebook page. And if you haven’t signed up the newsletter yet you may want to do that so you can be the first to hear the latest news and get the latest exclusive savings.
Hope you are having a beautiful week!
Putting Pen to Paper: The Stuff, Documented {Day Eleven}
When you think “Story Lives Here” what do you think of?
Do your thoughts land on events? On people and relationships? On moments? On everyday happenings?
I confess this is my usual tendency and it’s why most of my scrapbook pages are filled with photos and stories of my daughter, husband and the moments we share together. I have deep love for scrapping moments. And personality and character. You know, People Things.
This month’s Putting Pen to Paper prompts ask us to consider the Story from a different perspective as we consider The Things, The Stuff that we interact with, depend upon, enjoy, and otherwise make use of in our days. This Stuff…These Things…they are “artifacts” of our story. They often reveal a lot about who we are at any moment and what we care about or how we spend our time. And scrapping the story of our artifacts can provide a fun and fresh glimpse into our lives and relationships with our loved ones.
So as we approach these prompts about our nouns, our stuff…keep your eyes open in a fresh way and pay attention to what surrounds you as you walk through your day. Sometimes these artifacts are symbols of something you value, or symbols of the nature of a relationship or season in your life. Sometimes scrapping The Stuff can simply be fun and easy going, even silly. But together with our other stories and pages it weaves a beautiful portrait of our lives.
So let’s have a little fun considering our Artifacts and get started with the first prompt for this month (which is Day Eleven in the Putting Pen to Paper series). Here is today’s prompt:
There are so many avenues you could take with this prompt.
You could take photos of the things “left behind” at the end of the day. A kind of “Kids Were Here” documentation wherein you are capturing the *evidence* of what happened in your day without actually photographing it as it happens. Think: shoes or puzzle pieces strewn on the ground, chalk left on the sidewalk, flour on the counter, notes on your desk…any Things that reveal what happened in your day — the evidence.
When I was writing this prompt I was having fun taking photos with my phone and preserving them in Instagram as part of my Time Capsule project. And on this day I had decided to snap photos of various “things” in my life that day. I called it Day Described in Nouns. It was a fun exercise for documenting the everyday and it inspired my thinking of all the ways Things appear in our Daily Stories. You could take this approach. It’s like a Photo Walk as you walk through your day.
You could document the Things that define a loved one’s personality. Or a current favorite. Or a pet peeve. Or something you cherish. Or, or, or…let your creativity guide you as you explore the possibilities of revealing and sharing your story through the documentation of The Stuff.
And let yourself be inspired by these amazing prompt plays from the Storytellers:
From Aaron:
Aaron, a school teacher, scrapped a simple something that seems to be filling his days more and more: the copier. Which of course, on its face, reveals a bit about his work life but it also reveals more..that his focus in work recently has been more focused on preparing his students for testing. That this is a Story of his Now reveals what he is caring about at this moment and how some of his time is filled. I love how he cohesively echoed the theme with his schooly element choices.
From Stephanie:
Journaling reads:
Every weekday morning we have the same routine. Breakfast, brush teeth, get dressed, out the door. You two add into this bickering, bothering and bantering. I end up prodding, reminding, yelling. It’s a frustrating and vicious cycle.
Stephanie fabulously used color choice and played with word art (adding “not” to the “happy” pennant) to reveal the story of a Thing that dominates her morning routine…and often in a really frustrating way. I love her use of a brief and simple list of morning tasks coupled with action verbs that define the tone of that can emerge in this time sensitive before school morning (bickering, bothering and bantering, prodding, reminding, yelling) in her journaling. Both work together to subtley convey that ever present *tick.tick.tick* of the clock and the time-focused hecticness of a morning routine.
From Jude:
Journaling reads:
Food is pretty important in our house, it doesn’t necessarily have to be really flashy, but the day is never entirely satisfactory unless there’s been at least one yummy meal. We mostly cook from scratch, so we don’t mind spending time in the kitchen but we do prefer things that aren’t too complicated! We have an extensive range of cookbooks and they’ve all got nice, authenticly splattered pages to show they get used. Our favourite recipes are usually the really interestingly flavoured ones. I love to have Mexican food as a treat, Enchiladas are my absolute favourite, but I adore Thai and other east asian cuisines as well as Indian, Mediterreanean and lots of others.
Luckily, the girls share our tastes. They’ll try pretty much anything, and mostly like anything too (unless it’s hotter than can be fixed with a big glass of water) so it’s ok for us to be adventurous when we’re cooking.
I really love how Jude chose to document a Thing that at once reflects family traditions and likes and shared time together. This is the kind of portrait of the little things that I would have loved to see in my grandparent’s scrapbook and in my own. The little things that are SO regular for us that we may not even think to document them, but they will be so wonderful to have remembered. Jude also chose elements to underscore her journaling and that creates such a fabulous cohesiveness and colorfulness to the page.
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Putting Pen to Paper is a story-centric scrapbooking and journaling series. I hope it will inspire you to document your stories in a meaningful way that helps you live life more meaningfully too. Please remember anyone is welcome to join in and follow along at any time. Looking forward to sharing a fresh prompt next Wednesday!
Happy Scrapping!
Making Facebook Work for You :: Volume Two
Wherein I build upon my previous Making Facebook Work for You post and share another tip for controlling content on Facebook. We all appreciate having a little more control over what we see and how we interact with people and content on Facebook right? So let’s grab a little bit of it.
My first post was all about the list-y goodness. And I’m still a BIG fan of lists. It is the single easiest way for me to keep up with everyone I want to connect with and organize the content that comes through my News Feed. So if you haven’t made friends with listing, I would highly recommend it.
Today I want to share a tip about interacting with Pages. This is something you may have discovered on your own already but it’s one that is relatively New to Me. And it’s worth a share because the dynamic for what we see on Facebook has changed a bit with the implementation of Timeline.
Have you noticed that some Pages you’ve liked don’t seem to appear in your News Feed very often? Do you ever feel like you’re missing posts from people (or Pages)? You may find yourself wondering “Hey, I haven’t seen any posts from So-And-So lately”. Only to wander over to their actual FB page or profile to see they’ve actually been quite chatty and you’ve just missed seeing it.
Or maybe you run a Facebook Page and have noticed a downtick in interactions with your Page?
It’s not just your imagination.
You see, the gurus at Facebook have developed some pretty smart programs that influence what we see in our News Feeds, especially with regard to Page content. Generally speaking, while most of us don’t really know *exactly* what factors dictate what we see or *precisely* how it works, we do have a decent idea of what makes News Feed content tick. The best information we have indicates these programming formulas and algorithms are designed to work in a way that builds upon how we interact on Facebook. With What and With Whom. And How Often. And in What Way.
And in this context, “interact” means “like”, comment, tag, post on walls, and all that other fun stuff we users of Facebook do.
These programs have figured that what we interact with MOST is what we would want to see more of, right? Makes sense.
This works on an individual level and on a Pages level.
And it’s not necessarily anything New New, especially with regard to our friends lists. We’re kind of used to it by now. This kind of “interaction based” organization of content is actually the driving force behind that “Top Stories” option for the News Feed. It’s FB programming trying to show you what they THINK you want to see because the posts are getting a lot of interaction from others you know or maybe you yourself have interacted with said person before.
{Incidentally, as an aside, hopefully by now you know that you can control this setting too. FB has finally responded to complaints about that and there now (again) exists the option to choose “Most Recent” instead of “Top Stories” for the viewing of your main News Feed. YAY. And Hooray.}
This means you’re likely to see posts from your BFF in your News Feed more often and more regularly because you’re likely to “interact” with her posts more regularly and more often.
And that part is great.
But it’s (more than) possible that your friends list isn’t filled only with people you interact with regularly and consistently. You may have many more acquaintances, community connections or even gaming friends that aren’t as near and dear to your heart in a personal way and so you’re not posting to or with them as often as BFF.
Like Dear Sweet Aunt Edna for example (who is super hip and with it and therefore has a FB profile herself now). Dear Sweet Aunt Edna is certainly dear and sweet and super hip, but maybe she’s not a person you interact with regularly. And so it’s likely she (or anyone else who you don’t actively engage with on a regular basis) may not appear in your feed when she posts. Still, she’s someone you don’t want to ignore or pass over when she finally makes a post about something.
And this is true for Pages you have liked too.
And what you see from Pages in your News Feed is even more rooted in interactions. It’s all about “EdgeRank“. Which basically means: The Pages you interact with regularly and consistently are likely to appear in your News Feed more regularly. Whereas all other Pages are likely to fall off your News Feed map.
So a page that is like your BFF (one you “interact” with via likes, comments, and such) is more likely to appear in your News Feed when they make a new post, whereas The Useful Page But One You Don’t “Talk” To is likely to fall away from your News Feed.
This means the onus is on the Pages and Brands you like to create engaging content to keep you interacting with their Pages so that their content shows regularly in News Feeds.. Which is good. More engaging content is good.
But I’m a Page lurker. And I suspect there are many more like me. I don’t necessarily post on pages, but I *do* want to know what they are saying. So I’ve been missing content from Pages I have liked. Bummer.
So. What is a Person (Who-Doesn’t-Want-To-Post-On-Pages-All-The-Time-In-Order-To-See-Them-In-Feed) to do?
Here are two ways to Manage Pages (and friends) content.
One solution is: The lists (trust me: you totally want to make friends with lists). This is an especially great way to solve this problem for keeping up with individual friends or groups of friends. Lists will help ensure you see anyone you want to see. And it’s the best way to make sure you’re keeping up with posts from BFF and Dear Aunt Edna or any of the other people you don’t interact with regularly but who you still want to pay attention to.
And this is how I chose to keep up with Pages I was interested in before I discovered this New to Me thing. I had created a list called Pages. And added all those Pages I wanted to “lurk”, quietly following their content. And all was well and merry. Worked beautifully.
And then one day…poof! My “Pages” list was gone.
Only it wasn’t. It was just someplace New to Me.
And this is where the second solution lives:
Now there emerged an Interests List. This is a new-ish feature from Facebook. You’ll find it in your left sidebar. You may need to click “More” to reveal it.
And Facebook placed my “Pages” list there. Look! Yay!
You can build and use your interest lists much like you would any other list. Only it’s most valuable and useful for organizing the Pages you’d like to keep up with.
You can create different Interest Lists for different Interests. I’ve created one for my “favorite” pages. It includes business connections, scrapbooking and storytelling related pages, and a few other uplifting pages. And by clicking “Manage lists” you can further control what content you want to see from your Pages.
You can create any of your own pages here:
Simply click “Add Interests” to create a new Interests List.
To add Pages to your Interest List go to any Page you’ve liked (or do this when you *first* like a page) and hover over “Like” (or “Liked” as the case may be). There you can add the Page to a specific Interest List. You can also decide to show this page (or not) in your News Feed by (un)checking “Show in News Feed”:
You can also add any page to an Interests list this way. Under any cover photo, toward the right of your screen you will see the “Like” and Message Interface. Next to that is a wee “gear”. Click on it and a drop down appears. Here you have the option to Add to Interest Lists as well:
With your Interests Lists YOU are in control of what you want to see and how you want to organize it. You can be sure to keep up with any Page you hope to follow regardless of how often you actively “interact” with it.
Recently during National Scrapbooking Day, I found my Interest Lists to be invaluable. I was able to keep up with all the News from my Favorite Pages and didn’t miss a thing. And I make really good use of it when hoping to find a little inspiration in just a few clicks from one of my favorite uplifting pages.
I hope you will find this useful in your own Quest to Control Content.
(Here’s a link from FB help that further shows how you can control what you see in your feed: How do I control what I see in my News Feed?)