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Pie Chart Stories

by Angie Lucas | 10 years ago

What’s your favorite flavor of pie? While I admit that I am not, in general, a huge fan of pie, I do have a favorite: apple streusel with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce. Mmmm.

My second favorite kind of pie is a pie CHART on a scrapbook page. (You knew that was coming, right?) And today I have two fun examples of why it really can be worth the extra effort to tell a visual story with a paper-pieced pie chart.

When to Journal in Pie Charts

• When you want to show the smaller divisions of one larger thing
• When you’re willing to allow your journaling to take up a sizeable chunk of space on your page
• To scrapbook about how a typical day is spent (sleeping, working, cleaning up messes, Facebooking, etc.), where all your hard-earned money goes (mortgage, utilities, food, recreation, Starbucks, etc.), how you passed the time on your latest road trip, and countless other creative uses

Story First

This was the first time I tried a pie chart on a page. And let me tell you, because I dove in and just started playing, without an actual plan, it was harder than I thought to get the pie slices just right. So watch the video above if you’d like to make it easier on yourself!

My goal here was to capture the breakdown of an average day for Keira at 11 months old. I like the visual, pie-chart approach for this story, because you immediately get the idea of how these activities compare to each other. The minute you look at it, it’s clear that this little one would sleep away the bulk of every day. For all the other activities, I was really just estimating, anyway. If I were sharing this information in another format, such as a list, I might have had to be more specific: “3 hours a day spent eating” or “1.5 hours spent dancing” in order to get the comparative effect I wanted.

Photo First

This was my very first time shopping for my own home, and I was excited beyond belief. Looking at these pictures reminded me of exactly how I felt (elated!) when we were walking through the empty rooms, exploring the lot, and imagining how we would arrange each room. But as we started doing the actual work of packing up and moving from point A to point B, my feelings of elation were more than balanced by a few other feelings; it was a mood roller coaster! And that’s when I realized a pie chart would be a great way to tell this story.

Because I had chosen a busy patchwork background paper, I knew I needed to keep my pie chart fairly subtle and monochromatic so it didn’t overwhelm the page. I found a coordinating set of kraft-colored, lightweight patterned papers that were perfect for the job. I like the subtle shift in pattern from one wedge to the next. The circle looks cohesive from far away, but the patterns are easily detectable close up. And the patterns aren’t too busy to interfere with my hand-written journaling.

Your Turn
Imagine how fun it would be to create a page like this about yourself or about one of your kids every few years, just to see how much things have changed.

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