15/10/2015

Inspiration: Children


Over a year ago I asked in my blog's Facebook what you'd like me to post about. Of course I shall continue sharing the crafts and DT work I do, but I wondered if there's something more that you'd like to know. Like something about the mediums I use, my favorite supplies, about my process or similar. What was suggested was a post about inspiration. So I decided to start a series of post concentrating on something that inspires me.

Here's links to previous posts on the series:

6) Inspiration: Instagram
7) Inspiration: Moodboards
8) My favorite supplies
9) Inspiration: Events, crops, workshops
10) Inspirarion: Photos


I thought long about a new topic for the series and almost gave up. There's twelve posts already, a year of inspiration. Then I started to think about one of my biggest inspiration - my children. I felt a bit unsure first if I should use this as a subject because not all have children. But then I found an angle - we all have BEEN children. So if you don't have children or they are all grown up already try to apply the following ideas to document your own childhood for example. My own daughters are currently 6 and 4 so that's the angle I'm kind of using, so you know. A 14-year-old might not get as excited to draw to a 12x12 paper than a 6-year-old, for example. 

First idea that comes to mind is of course use the children as the topic of the creation. If you are a scrapbooker and have children I bet you have a few pages made just this way. The same applies of course to all loved ones - mom's, cousins, pets, favorite foods an such. Of course we document the things that are dear to us and make us smile and take out the camera. You might see the change and growth fastest in children, at least during the first years. But of course other things change, too. So documenting something on yearly basis might be a fun idea in every subject! 


What you could also do is to include the child's imprint to your creation. Cut out an animal, object or person of a drawing and use that as an embellishment for example. Or give the kid a 12x12 sheet and some colors and get your very own, totally unique background. Or like in the layout above - use finger prints or hand prints as a part of the background. There's a number of ways to get the child's own expression, own hand print so to say to the page. Something like Project Life gives also a great opportunity to include tiny works of art to the wholeness - just one hand drawn journaling card here and there makes a big difference and makes the whole process more like a family thing not only one person's job.

If you are interested to read more about how to "add a toddler's touch to your pages", please see if you can find a copy of Everyday Storyteller 2 book! I have an article on there with that theme. Here's a link to the Simple Scrapper site (link) and to Amazon (link). (Oh the memories! The book came out in 2013.)


Kids also use words very differently than adults. Toddlers make up words of their own and teenagers as well - lol, yolo. Just listen their speech and maybe recognize some words that they tend to use a lot. Or maybe you have a phrase the whole family uses that actually started out as a misheard or misspelled word? I know that we have several of those - some from children, others from text messages between me and my husband. You can use these special words for your title or document them through journaling.

One fun thing that I did when my daughters were even smaller than they are today was to record their playing through words they were babbling. I would have needed to know shorthand while doing so, but somehow I managed to write something and document just the way they were using the words and telling a story so to say. It makes me smile when I'm reading these stories nowadays as they somehow have partly recorded the essence of the person.


Most of the projects pictured here are scrapbooking pages but you don't have to limit yourself to those. Art journaling, canvases, mixed media also gives great playground to documenting and including kids to the projects. Try altering a toy or make a canvas in cooperation with your little (or a bit bigger) one. If scrapbooking is your thing then try to think how to replace the photo of the kid for example - use a drawing instead or take a picture of the favorite soft toy.

And like I said in the beginning - you can always document your own childhood as well! The first layout in this post is actually made out of me. The photo is not directly connected to the subject but it was a happy one and went well with the memory I wanted to record. I kept a dairy when I was younger but there's a huge gap in documentation between the time I ended keeping a dairy and started scrapbooking. And in the beginning I scrapbooked mostly about my kids and left myself out of the equation in a way so there's room to document all kinds of little bibs and bobs of information that might be interesting fro my kids to read later on.



Here's just a few ideas to get you going:

- do a page with two or more photos taken a year or even a month a part - what has changed?

- document an event through child's eyes, maybe let him/her do the journaling

- document the words your child is using - is there special ones that only make sense in your family?

- let your child choose the color palette for your project

- include your child to the process, paint, doodle or draw and use that as a jumping off point

- add an envelope to your project and fill it with drawings or writings

- document your own childhood, your favorite toy, the school subject, the teacher, the friends...

- let your child take the photos

- write or record your child's speech and include that to your project

- make a collage of with your kid and use that as a jumping of point to a project

- document what your child calls you and other members of the family

- draw your family's hand prints and include them to a project


Like always, I hope you found this post interesting or perhaps even inspiring! I'm continuing to write these post to the end of the year so two posts still to come! Please also remember the "Inspired by" posts as I usually try to open up my process in them.

Thank you for stopping by today!

2 comments:

enkulin käsityöt said...

Oi että ovat upeita nuo leiskat ja apua noita pieniä hevosia.Todella kauniita.

Dawn C. said...

I love your inspired by post. Lots of great ideas here, even for those who do not have children! Thank you!

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