Scrapbook home
We all make memories. But Stacy Julian preserves them.
Julian is a professional scrapbooker. She’s written books, served as the first editor of Simply Scrapbooks magazine, and founded the online scrapbooking resource site, Big Picture Scrapbooks.
Now, the Liberty Lake mother of five is bringing memories and scrapbooking together into her home decor. She is, in essence, scapbooking her home.
Julian and her family have lived in Liberty Lake for seven years and moved last summer to a spacious new home in the Legacy Ridge development. While Julian admits the interior design is a work in progress, it’s starting to show her scrapbooker’s touch.
Take the Music Memory Room, a small sitting room just off the main entry.
“People have rooms for all kinds of reasons – game rooms and all kinds of rooms,” she said. “If your mother is a professional scrapbooker, you pretty much have to have a memory room.”
In her memory room, Julian keeps her scrapbooks, detailing the lives of her family and friends.
“Everything in here has to have a connection to another person or place,” she said.
The antique Underwood typewriter, for instance. Her grandfather used it to type letters announcing her birth. She displays another grandfather’s violin.
The giant copper kettle has been in the family for five generations. A milk jug was purchased in honor of another grandfather who was a dairyman.
On the wall, written in Julian’s hand and reproduced in vinyl lettering, are the words, “There are homes I know without children, but none of them have the same noise and laughter.”
Julian’s home is no stranger to children’s noise and laughter. She and her husband, Geoffrey, have four sons from 14 to 5 years old. Last fall, they added daughter Addie to their brood.
As she was thinking about building her home office, Julian knew she needed a place where she could leave behind the chaos.
Her bright yellow office does the trick.
The basement room sports “butter” walls and a large window overlooking a neighborhood park. A room-length closet serves as a supply area.
A large built-in desk and a comfortable chair take up one wall, while a custom-made scrapbooker’s island serves as the central workspace. Shelves hold colorful scrapbooking materials, funky boxes and splashes of orange, blue, yellow and green.
Some floral prints are accented with a simple word, “create,” in large vinyl letters. Cheerful flower designs are inlaid in the Marmoleum floor.
“I need to walk into this room and be energized,” she said. “This is a happy place to be.
“I have a full day of work ahead of me, but aren’t I lucky to work in an industry that inspires my creativity?”
The decor also came about as part of a new way of thinking about color, Julian said. A few years ago, she attended a workshop given by color expert Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. Eiseman blew Julian’s traditional views about color out the window, she said.
“She said basically color is visual emotion. You see how people connect to it and then surround yourself with it,” Julian said. “It completely changed the way I dress and how I decorate my house.”
The idea also found its way into her scrapbooking.
“My message in scrapbooking is you have to let go and have a little fun,” she said. “When you allow yourself to play in scrapbooking, you build your creative confidence.”
Julian’s confidence is evident in the décor of her home.
“You also practice, and you get an intuitive sense of proportion, so if it looks good on a page, it’ll look good in a wall.”