Simple Studio: When the words fail you, just sing a song!

Do you remember those high-school tapes we carefully mixed—hopefully I'm not dating myself too bad here—with all of our favorite songs on them? Songs that spoke the words that our conflicted high-school souls just couldn't get out, ha! :) Well, I've noticed that when words fail me, I can often turn to music for inspiration. In some instances, I'll even let the lyrics of a song be my actual journaling. Now don't get me wrong, I think journaling is one of the more important aspects of scrapbooking. For me, at least. I'm all about getting the stories down. But every once in a while, music can speak to me on a layout in a way that just plain words cannot. Usually this sort of thing happens when I have a special picture—or pictures, as in the case of the third layout—that I just like for some unknown reason.

For example, here's an older layout I did for the magazine sometime last year. It's a picture of Hoonie when he was just seven days old. It's actually one of many (thousands of, in fact!) pictures I took of him in those first few days of life. But for some reason, this one was the one that melted my heart, so to speak. So along with just a few embellishments and a sheet of patterned paper, I added my "journaling" which was basically just the first line of a favorite Raffi song. In case it's too faint to read in the scan, the journaling reads, "Baby Dear...blessed be your shining light."

Now I know it's not the perfect baby picture by any means, but something about it really touched me. And when I paired it with the lyrics to the Raffi song, I knew I had done the picture justice. :)

Another older baby layout that I did uses both lyrics from an old Earth, Wind and Fire song along with a few of my own.

I love this picture of Hoonie because he looks so bright and happy here...full of endless possibilities. And something about it just made me naturally think of this song. I also added a few of my own words after the lyrics because I thought it helped tie the layout together nicely.

My last example of music-inspired journaling was inspired by a group of pictures. One of my favorite ways to document the sights of a special holiday or season is to make a photo collage of it. Here's one I made just recently of Christmas decor found around our home right now.

After printing it out in 4x6 (it's easy to resize a collage in Photoshop), I mounted it onto cardstock that I had pre-printed with the lyrics to one of my favorite Christmas songs. I then put that on some patterned paper, added some ribbon and stickers and ended up with a simple and easy layout that captures one of my favorite parts about this time of year...the decorating, of course! :)

So hopefully I've been able to inspire you with some examples of how you can incorporate music into your journaling. I know it has come to my rescue more than once. And if you get the chance to try it yourself, please don't forget to share with all of us by posting it in the Simple gallery (and adding a link here in the comments). I'd love to see what you come up with!

Now who wants to join me in an impromptu Christmas sing-along? ;)