This week just got a little more crafty! The Our Story Matters Collection is all about documenting the stories behind the photos, the memories behind the moments, and the everyday pieces of life that deserve to be remembered. With hand-drawn icons, thoughtful phrases, and a warm, creative color palette, this collection was designed to help you tell YOUR story in a way that feels authentic and beautiful.

Penny

The memory keeping theme of the Our Story Matters collection made it a perfect choice for documenting one year of Scrap with Penny, my 2026 iNSD scrapbooking fun, and my cozy creative space I call Story Central.
I wanted this page to feel bright, happy, and full of heart, just like my scrapbooking approach. I built the background with wide strips of patterned paper, grounded on the adorable gingham, to show off as many of the cheerful designs as I could. The page brings together a few pieces of my scrapbooking story — National Scrapbook Day, messy desk days, my YouTube channel milestone, and the community that has grown around paper, photos, and memories.
The embellishments were such a fun fit for this layout. I used cameras, flowers, typewriters, hearts, and little memory keeping icons to create a playful “shelf” across the top of the page and to support the title area at the bottom. I also used the solid papers in the collection to create a few custom word phrases, which let me add little story-specific touches in colors that matched the page perfectly.
For the title, I cut “Story Central” on my Silhouette Cameo and paired it with my channel tagline, “where paper meets story.” I added horizontal tone-on-tone stitching to several of the paper strips, which gave the page a little handmade texture for a finishing touch.
I love that this collection helped me tell a story about telling stories — which feels just about perfect for this first year of Scrap with Penny.

Kristin

Our Story Matters is such a vibrant and colorful collection that is very versatile and can be used to document everyday moments as well as special moments. I triple matted the layout with 2 papers from the collection and a plain white cardstock from my stash. I then cut the film strip paper into strips and scored the strips so that they had peaks and valleys, which added movement and dimension to the layout. I opted to use a photo frame cluster from the digital collection to document an everyday photo of my son at school. I added a couple of floral clusters, a viewfinder reel, camera, and hearts from the collection. I then completed the layout with the title "Say Cheese!" using alphas from the collection!

Ana

Hi crafty friends! Today I’m sharing my second Creative Team project using this collection and it’s safe to say that this is definitely one of my favorite collections from Traci Reed Designs!
I love the colors, the patterns, and how perfectly it screams and celebrates memory keeping. Everything about it just feels fun, happy, and made for documenting stories — so yes, this one easily made it to my top faves!
For this project, I created one of my usual minis and used my favorite patterned paper colors throughout the pages - pink, yellow, and blue. I also chose blue because it happens to be one of our wedding colors.
On the cover, I used my favorite journaling card from the collection that says “life is a scrapbook fill it with stories worth sharing” and turned it into a shaker element! Because as I always say, anything shaker is automatically awesome (plus a personal fave!). I filled it with colorful confetti shaker bits because our story should always feel like a party, and the bright happy colors matched the whole vibe of the collection (and of what life should be) perfectly.
Inside, I added lots of journaling cards and tags because I really love a fully loaded mini even before adding photos and journaling. Plus, it makes it more interactive and fun.
This collection truly made creating this project fun and I already know I’ll be reaching for it again soon!

Laura

For my layout I’m switching things up. I’m repurposing an old planner and loving this 4x6 size. Which makes it easier for me to document since it doesn’t overwhelm me. So I took one of the 4x6 patterned cards and added my vellum overlay on it to tone down the busyness.
In the Our Story Matters collection there are the premade photo clusters which makes it super easy. Just add your photo in the square and you don’t have to worry about other embellishments. I fussy cut the lace trim and added it to the bottom of the notebook card. Then the same with the title and camera embellishment.

Ruth

At first glance our story matters is bright, bold, and all about scrapbooking and photo albums. (And I love that and have made many happy “cropping with my friends” layouts since it's released). However, if you dig in, that's not all it has to be about.
I uploaded the film strip to my cricut and asked it to cut rather than print, resizing and cropping as necessary. Then I've printed the ink splats from the embellishments kit on a full sheet of paper and added in the super cool lettering (beetle juice anyone?), giving that a black offset border to make it pop on my white page. Add in some blue pieces from the sticker pack. (Opposite on the colour wheel don't ya know?) And the whole thing pops right off the page with these arty sunset photos.

Danica

I love the floral cluster stickers that Traci sometimes includes in her collections. They are a great springboard to create more dynamic clusters. For my layout I took three of her floral cluster stickers for the base of my photo mat. I then took one of the premade frames from the kit to use for my photo of Princess Charlotte. The frame didn’t quite fit the dimensions of my photo. I duplicated on its own layer, moved this layer down to where it framed my photo, erased the overlapping centers, merging the two layers together. Now the frame fits. I scattered some more floral stickers throughout the page. The title is from Clever Monkey Graphics. I finished off my page by framing it with a heart border created from one of the patterned papers included in the collection.