Make a Scrapbook Diary
Sometimes a plain old written diary isn't good enough. Maybe you want a fancy book devoted to all your thoughts and feelings, with lists, pictures, and souvenirs. Read on to find out how you can make the perfect scrapbook diary.
Steps
- Choose a diary or journal that you like. It could be an old fashioned leather-bound book, or maybe it's a 3 ring notebook from the dollar store. It doesn't matter what it looks like as long as you're comfortable using it.
- Decorate the outside, if you wish. You could cover the outside in tinfoil and glue on pictures out of magazines, or you could cover the whole thing in paper and draw your own cover. You could even glue pictures or put stickers right on the notebook. It's up to you.
- Start the inside! Write about yourself. Include perhaps a picture of yourself, your family/pet, or something that represents you. After you've finished writing a bit about yourself, start looking around in magazines and on the internet for pictures you'd like to include once you really start your journal.
- Begin to write! Write about work/school, life, your thoughts and emotions, your friends and enemies. Write lists (of favorites or least favorites, such as food, songs, colors, people, things to do, etc). You could even write a master list all about yourself. Include everything that is your favorite (T.V show, movie, actor, food, type of pop, sport, book, animal, and get creative with your list!)
- As you get into the writing, you'll find all sorts of ways to use your creativity. Glue pictures in your diary that correspond with what you write-your family, your favorite animal, a trip you went on last summer. Paste in pictures you've printed from the internet, of favorite actors, singers, places...even embellish your diary with stickers, quotes, different colors of writing, there are no limits!
- Get creative with the scrapbooking aspect of the diary. Begin to glue in things from your daily life, or things that bring you good memories. Good things to start with are tickets from that great concert you just went to, bills or cards from your favourite restaurants, plane tickets from your most recent trip, and anything significant to you.
- Don't limit yourself, use whatever you find. You can draw pictures, glue in colourful symbols, diagrams and glitter, whatever you find appropriate for your diary. No one else is going to see it (unless you choose to show it to them) so be as imaginative and strange as you wish. Have fun with it!
Tips
- Think about what you'd want to see from your diary in a couple of years. Probably not a few threadbare pages and the rest blank, right? Fill up your diary with everything that represents you. Add detail about your life, because believe it or not, you might forget why you hated that teacher so much, or why you liked wearing mismatched socks.
- Try to write in or embellish your diary every day, it's easier to stick to it that way.
- Don't hold back, and don't be self conscious, no one has to see it.
- Don't cut up magazines that don't belong to you, and don't use images, souvenirs, or materials (glue, stickers, pencil crayons) that aren't yours unless you've asked the owner.
Warnings
- Don't try to get everything perfect, and don't worry if your diary isn't exactly the way you want it to be. It doesn't need to be perfect and you're not getting a grade for it, so just go ahead and make it wild and imperfect.
- Don't write bad things about people in your diary if you intend to show off your diary. The problem with having a pretty scrapbook diary is that you can be tempted to show it off to your friends, so don't write things that you don't want anyone else to see.
Things You'll Need
- A notebook/journal that you like
- Magazines
- Scissors
- Glue
- Pencil crayons, markers, pens, etc
- Pictures
- Glitter, stickers, etc
- Tickets, receipts, business cards and other souvenirs
