Monday Giveaway : Studio Calico

My favorite thing right now is going through my vacation photos we just took, and getting ready to make a beautiful album, so we can remember our amazing trip forever!!

My favorite thing and the reason I keep memories and take photo's is for my children. I have no recollection of my childhood and I would die if that happened to my children. They will not have to rely on my memory for theirs to flourish when they get older. All they will need to do it open a scrap book or look at photo's... They will know they are loved and always have been. Some people find it odd that I scrap or take so many pictures. I don't say it to them but I find it odd that they don't. It's not a yes or no thing for me, it's not a choice. I am driven to do it.

Writing things down so I will have my thoughts when I have the time to scrapbook

Watching the smiles on the faces of my children when they are reading the journaling I wrote about them. Big smiles. Love it.

right now I'm enjoying a focus on preserving my childhood story for my kids. it's hard to find the time to do that along with keeping up on their stories, but it's so important. summer has allowed some nice free time to get caught up on my part of the story. :)

It has to be when my two kids ask to see "their" pages or bring a scrapbook to us when we tell them to pick out a book to read before bedtime. :)

My favorite thing right now is my iphone. It takes pretty good quality pictures that print out to 4x6 nicely. I have it all the time and it gives me the freedom to take a quick picture when something worth remembering happens and I happen to not have my camera with me. The iphone is my backup.

cool stuff! My favorite thing about Memory keepers right now is not the yummy scrap supplies but the actual pictures! Yesterday I was at a 3 yr old's birthday party and took several photos and when I got home and looked at the different facial expressions of the people in the photo, i thought to myslef, "this is exactly why I scrap! I am keeping the memories alive and it makes me feel great inside!" My friends call me the papparazzi but I don't mind because later when were older, were going to enjoy looking back!

Thanks for being so generous. For me, I love having my 4 1/2 year old son look thru the albums. He loves gazing at certain pages and recounts what happended from his memories of certain times. Love that. This to me makes it worthwhile. Also scrapping is therapeutic for me.

My favorite thing right now is that it gives me a time to quiet my mind and get away from all the hustle and bustle of the day.

My favorite thing is to purposefully take time to remember the big AND little moments of each day. Scrapbooking helps me remember them by getting them down on paper.

Memory keeping is giving me an opportunity to appreciate the places and people (like my grandparents) I failed to honor when I was younger and is helping me to value the people in my life NOW before THEY become memories too.
My younger sister (18 years younger) has recently taken an interest in scrapbooking, so this is a new opportunity for us to connect (she lives very far away).

I love watching my children's faces when they pull out the scrapbooks I've made and see themselves. I love the way my DH pesters me to make more pages because he can't wait to see our story unfolding on 12 x 12 paper. I love focusing more on the writing than on worrying about embellishments or matching things.

for me it's what i think at that time about my daughters, my feelings for them, their words, all the things they do each day ... my grand ma passed away last year, and i realised how much important are memories ...
Michele from france

What a great giveaway. Thank you very much.
Lately, I am all words... The words compliment the photos in capturing life, but sometimes they are even more important.
I remember how I used to sit with my grandmother in the guest bedroom and look together at yellowing photos. She had only one photo of her parents and very few photos of her siblings and of herself, but she had so many stories, enough to fill up hours of grandmother-grandchild quality time.
I wish I have captured those stories, so I could pass them through to my future children, but I didn't.
Now, I don't want to make the same mistake again and I try to first capture the stories and then look for complimenting photos, rather than the other way around. (I have also written about it on my blog in: "Precede the words to the photos" post.

My current favorite memory keeping is blogging about our family life in a private blog between my wife and me. We brain dump all the good and bad and the ugly in there. One day we will open it up for our children to read when they reach adulthood and parenthood. It is absolutely amazing how much we forget and how quickly. Reading entries from just a couple of months ago, I would be like, wow, i totally had forgotten about it!!

hi ali,
what a great start to a monday morning! my favorite thing about memory keeping today is the same thing it has always been for me--a chance to record everyday life. i've always been curious about the ordinary things, the daily life of those who have lived in the past. some of my favorite scrapbook pages are my pictureless pages. years ago my friends would tease me (lovingly, of course!) about the pages in my scrapbook that contained objects and journaling --a restaurant menu with memories of the day journaled, for example. but, i hope that someday my kids and grandkids will find it interesting to know what kinds of foods we ate, how they were prepared, and what they cost. those kinds of ordinary things are so intriguing to me!

My favorite part is being more aware of the day to day!

I love recording the little everyday unimportant things...

Memory keeping is especially important to me right now, as I plan my wedding. It is important for me to not lose sight of all the normal day to day things I do as I plan this grand affair. It will be great later to be able to look back and remember the months leading up to my wedding with fondness, and not just the crazy hectic schedule that I am somehow managing to survive through! :D

ooh - what a great way to start the week. My favorite thing about memory keeping is recording my sons childhood and how he loves to inspire me without even knowing it!
Thanks Ali, great giveaway.

Good morning Ali,
Lately I feel like a "running rabbit with 2 heads" and barely keeping them above water!... so preserving memories for me is a way to stop time for a little bit.

Dear Ali,
My favorite thing about memory keeping is right now is capture the moment before it is getting lost. I like to make mini-albums with a theme. I also love to make vintage-albums of old pictures of my family. It's very nice to document their lifestyle and give it to them as a present. I have learned a lot from your great books. I love your style how to catch the everyday moments in a lay-out.
Kind regards from the Nederlands,
A huge fan of you, Odetta

My favorite thing about memory keeping right now is preserving the little moments between my new husband and I. It's such fun to look back at the mini album I did of our 1st six months and talk about how we felt after those first few dates!

My favorite thing about keeping memories right now is putting down the little quotes and such that my 4 year old seems to spit out on a daily basis. I'm also enjoying preparing scrapbooks and such for baby #2....