Today I had the pleasure of joining Stacey Julian and Noell Hymen to talk about Nostalgia on the Paperclipping Round Table
In preparing for the episode I was thinking about the role of nostaglia in scrapbooking through a loss. Since I do sometimes use scrapbooking as an adjunct to therapy with my own clients, I had lots of ideas about this topic (tune in to hear some of them!). But I also got to thinking about some of the tribute/nostalgia pages I’ve made over the years, and how scrapbooking an event or a person can help you look back with fond memories and help heal the pain of loss, whether it be loss of a person, a pet, or even a phase of life. Here is a sampling of some of my own personal pages that either trigger nostalgia, or that were created as part of the grieving process for me:
Here is a 2012 Project Life share video about an insert I created for the anniversary of my Dad’s death:
A few years ago our province was campaigning to win a national shipbuilding deal, and we ended up winning it, meaning $25 billion worth of development would be invested into our shipbuilding industry. Since my Dad was a shipwright, the whole campaign got me thinking about him, and wondering what he would think of it all… 
This page has a lot of my Dad’s favourite things- Tim Hortons, Vitamix, Lee Valley, wood, gears, book paper, a carpenter’s union sticker, nuts, a BC comic, filmstrip.
I created the background paper by using matte medium to collage a bunch of pieces of book paper (he loved books) to a piece of plain card stock.
Here is the process vid (from 2011):
Here’s the first layout I did about my dad, from back when I first started scrapbooking in 2009:
I put a lot of thought and energy into collecting things that represented him: Duct tape, tiny tools, dictionary paper (he was a Wordsworth), leather-looking tag, scrabble tiles.
And everything is distressed because it was 2009 and Tim Holtz distress inks were everywhere, and I had so much fun playing with them. Plus it reminded me of how dirty he used to be after work, or after working on the car.
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| My Dad was a cat-lover and used to help care for feral kittens who lived around the dockyards. |
And here are a few nostaglia type layouts I created not related to grieving. These are layouts I created some time after the photos were taken, and although for me, all older pics have a tendency to induce nostalgia, these layouts were created pretty much to induce nostalgia (listen to the show for more about that!).
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| Look at us: we were young, and crazy, and having a Disney Honeymoon! |
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| UR the Right type 4 Me! |
I don’t have many pictures of us before we had kids (for some reason those cute kids make all us parents photo-happy), so I love looking at my old honeymoon pictures! Feel the Nostalgia! I feel warmer already!
