I’ve taught myself a lot of technology tricks over the years, but I have to admit that Instagram Stories were a little hard for me to figure out at first. My daughter Riley had to walk me through how to add GIFS to stories so I asked her if she could share her knowledge here as well. She helped put together this awesome step-by-step visual tutorial. I hope you find it as helpful as I did! Be sure to check out my Instagram feed and stories as I’m posting to both a lot more these days.

Scrapbooking can be therapeutic for the person creating the page or album. A scrapbook can be therapeutic for the person looking at the album. While photo albums are also nice, I believe that it’s even more important to be able to read the thoughts and memories that go with the photos so I’m a firm believer in scrapbooks. That can still include photo albums if you do pocket style scrapping that includes journaling on the photos or on separate cards.

I have A LOT of experience in these areas so I’m excited to share a five really key points:

Today is our 30th wedding anniversary. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. It’s also kind of amazing to think we knew each other for 10 years before we got married (we met in 7th grade) which means we’ve known each other for 40 years. I literally can’t imagine my life without this wonderful man and I’m incredibly grateful to have him by my side.

I have a new collection in my shop today and it’s super important to me. You know how they say that you should create the things you need? Well, I’ve needed this collection to help me document so many stories. There are many different mental health needs in my family (including myself) and I know everyone’s mental well-being has taken a hit over the last year with the ongoing pandemic. I know I am going to find many uses for these cards, papers, stamps, and printables. And even though the templates are not specific only to this topic, I designed them to be able to tell big and important stories. I hope you will love all of these designs as much as I do!

I’ve been thinking about why I love documenting memories so much and it has a lot to do with my love of creating memories. They go hand in hand for me. If I’m going to put in the work to create some special memories, I want to make sure that my family and I remember them. I’ve been trying to find a hashtag on Instagram where I could connect with others who love creating and documenting memories as much as I do and I’ve had a hard time finding the right one, so I created my own. I’m going to use #createanddocumentmemories when I post about making or recording memories. Feel free to use it as well. I’d love to develop it as a community!

Today is my birthday! I’m turning 52 years old today and that is a very good thing because that means I made with through the last year. Birthdays are blessings! This one feels extra special because I’m also getting my Covid-19 vaccine today. Such a great gift!

I’ve been wanting to write about fonts for a long time now because I see so many posts out there recommending hard-to-read fonts. I’ve made thousands of scrapbook pages over the years (both paper and digital), taught scrapbooking classes, written for instructive scrapbooking sites, and been a digital designer. I’ve looked at A LOT of text and fonts over the years and have put a great deal of thought and study into my own font choices. It’s tempting to just download all the amazing fonts out there, especially when they are free. If you love fonts, go ahead and download to your hearts content, but be sure to do some research and figure out which ones look the best. Focus on readability above all else. It will make a huge difference in your projects!

I’ve created some graphics for you to pin or save as desired that will help you in your own font study. I’ve made sure that each font I’ve recommended is free to download and easy to find. All of the fonts in today’s post are actually OK for commercial use as well (always good to read the licenses to be sure). Links are included below.

I finished my February 2021 roundup and it feels good to have a new page for our family records. This is a great format for me, but there is no right or wrong way to do a roundup. I even shared a GIF template in my Instagram stories the other day and quite a few people enjoyed using that for their roundup. I’ll share that later in the post.

I usually tweak the roundup graphic a bit each year and I think this is my favorite one so far. Feel free to save it for your own use. I’ll post a new one each month to remind us all to document our everyday lives.