Rylie Horrall |  Lifestyle Editor

As the school year comes to a close, students may find themselves looking back on the memories they’ve made throughout their time at Western and want to memorialize the experiences they’ve had. A way to do this is to create a memory book filled with significant things and events from a specific time period.

To start, grab something to use as a base — this could be an unused photo album, a notebook, a sketchbook or something similar. Additionally, Amazon has scrapbooks and similar items that can be bought online, if that’s preferred. 

After finding what will be used, plan out how pages will look. Memories and photos can be organized chronologically, by events, milestones or themes, to name a few options. These can be printed at home, a store or even ordered online; to save money or express more creativity, a person can recreate their favorite photos through drawings or paintings.

According to mimeophotos.com, it’s also common for people to include text, illustrations, clippings and various mementos in their memory books. This can add more meaning to the project as a whole if it’s filled with things that have meaning — concert tickets from throughout the year, buttons purchased from attended events, a pressed flower from a gift or postcards from trips. Adding in text and drawing doodles across the section could be an opportunity to play with fonts and themes on each page. 

Finally, while including the positive things that occurred in a time period, it’s also important to incorporate the difficult experiences, if the person is comfortable with doing so; they may have been unpleasant, but they still happened and were overcome, so why not acknowledge the fact that they came and went? This helps to create an accurate representation of a person’s life, and show that both good and bad times will always come around.

Contact the author at rhorrall17@wou.edu

Photo by Rylie Horrall