Blog: Story Play | Yesterday + Today Project

Welcome to a week of ideas and inspiration for tellings stories using this year's Story Play Yesterday + Today Mini Kit.

Yesterday + Today is a theme that has been close to my heart for many years. It started back around 2011 when I created a class of the same name that features 12 lessons about telling stories from the past and from today. It's a self-paced workshop you can still take today - more details here. When we were brainstorming themes for our 2026 Story Play kits this concept rose to the top.

This week I'll be sharing my projects using the Yesterday + Today Mini Kit. Feel free to play along with me or bookmark these ideas for future storytelling inspiration. Over on our AED Instagram account we will also be sharing ten story prompts to spark ideas for this theme. New prompts will be posted at 10am PST and 5pm PST each weekday this week.

Let's dive in to today's process video:

Here are images of my finished project:

This year I'm telling my stories in a 10x8 album which gives me flexibility for creating a variety of page sizes and page protector configurations. I'm loving the big horizontal and even did a 22 inch wide photo (one photo that goes across both pages) for one of my recent Quarterly Storyteller Kit projects.

For this first story I went diving into my parents photo albums to see if I could find some river photos (I knew there were some in there from past flip throughs). Going to rivers in the summer in Oregon is one of the best things! I found a photo of myself and my siblings with my Dad in the Coos River (along with a few others) and am pairing that with a photo of me sitting in a creek last week.

With the extra photos I wanted to include I decided to crop and print them in a strip that is the same width as one of the chipboard tags. I ended up cutting up the tags in order to have the tag shape at the top and add some red/white twine and that gave me the flexibly to move the sentiments from the chipboard tags in between whatever small photos I wanted.

I also decided to corner round the edges because that's how I was feeling when I was making it. I noticed that I forgot to corner round the edges of the second page before photographing but I did do it.

I cut up a page protector to hold three of the 3 inch x 4 inch journal cards from the kit and a second photo from Aaron and my adventure to the river. If you have more photos you want to include don't cut up the page protector! I'll probably do another story about our overnight itself.

On top of the journal cards I wanted to stamp the year so I did it twice. Once using a recent Numbers Are Awesome Stamp Set and the other using our Yearly Stamp Set (currently sold out but able to be restocked if enough people hit the Notify Me button). I used my Rose Garden pink ink for the larger date and a Gina K neon for the smaller full date. I also used the 3 inch x 4 inch Yesterday + Today stamp to add "who I am" and "who I was" right above the small year stamp.

Tab stickers were added to the top of the journal cards and along the outside edge of the cut up page protector.