Masters Monday: Start With The End In Mind

For the most part, I hate having a schedule and set-in-stone plans. I don’t do well when things go wrong, so it’s best to let things come and go as they will. But I’m the complete opposite when it comes to scrapbooking – there’s a reason I’m in love with templates. Speed scraps are difficult for me because they are just a set of instructions that go step by step. So for this weeks Masters Monday post we’re going to be going back to the beginning steps and talking about Starting With The End In Mind.

Let’s first start off with what’s driving your scrapbook page. Is it the photos, a saying, a challenge or a kit? Usually for me it starts with the photos and I work that way. However for this particular page it started with a poem.

The poem was written by my brother in law and was written for my father in laws funeral. As soon as I heard the poem, I knew I wanted to use it in a scrapbooking page. After getting permission from my brother in law, I got started.

So I knew what my ‘journaling’ was going to be, I just had to figure out everything else. So I started with photos. Because the poem was written about my father in law, I thought it appropriate to include pictures of mainly just him so I set out to find some of the photos of him growing up.

Then knowing how I wanted to arrange my layout, I knew I needed more photos. So to make each corner of my layout equal, I found 5 photos I thought also showed a lot about who this man was. I found an individual shot of him, then one of him with his wife and then one with each of his sons.

After finding photos, you should then decide if you’re going to use a template or do things your own way. As I previously mentioned, I already had a look in mind, so I didn’t need a template this go around.

Next comes the kit. This is what will really help your layout tell your story. Is it a cheerful layout with happy colors, or a more serious layout with more subdued colors? Make your choice and go about searching for the right kit. My father in law was a very patriotic man and the poem even mentions that about him, so I wanted kits with a patriotic theme. So I went to the Trixie Scraps store and searched for kits with the key word patriotic.

I didn’t quite get the kits I was looking for, so I had to change the word I used. I tried things like independence and July to get me to the kits I really wanted. I actually came across two kits and a paper package that I thought would be perfect for my layout. I decided to use Plaid Passion: Traditions Paper Pack, Stars and Stripes Mini Kit along with the alpha, and finally Scouting Is For Boys.

I then went about creating my layout. I started with my background, then I chose the large pictures matted with patterned paper, next was the pictures to be matted with blue and finally the unmatted photos. When I had the photos done, I did my title and the journaling. My final step was to add the embellishments.
This was the result and it came out almost exactly how I envisioned it in my mind.

I now have something everyone in the family can appreciate and I made sure it was something I took my time with and I made sure to start at the very beginning having the end look in mind. Why not go back to the beginning yourself and start with the end in mind.