Scrapbook My Life

Even the best writer occasionally wonders what to say on her scrapbook page. If you find yourself at a loss for words, here are a few journaling techniques to consider for your next layout:

• Use brochures, programs, and fliers to add journaling information pages about special places and events.
• Find a famous quote that relates to your topic, then use it as a starting point for your journaling.
• When creating a scrapbook as a gift, consider writing your journaling in the form of a letter addressed to the recipient.
• A top ten list can be used on a variety of pages, such as “The Top Ten Things Adam Loves About Preschool” or “The Top Ten Reasons Why I Love My Husband.”
• What does your family do in a typical month? Create a calendar page with listings of soccer practices, parent-teacher conferences, birthdays, haircuts, business trips, and the other activities that fill your days.
• Creating a timeline of important events and dates is a great way to combine a variety of photos into one unified layout.
• Classified ad journaling can add humor to a layout. If you were writing a classified ad for the perfect mother, what would you say?
• Acrostic journaling is easy to do and fun for personality pages. Write down each letter of a person’s name, then think of short phrases that begin with each letter and describe this person’s personality.
• Create a dictionary definition of your subject. For example, how would you define your spouse or your children?
• A scrapbook can be used to preserve important family recipes like the one for Grandma’s apple pie, but give your self permission to go beyond the obvious. How about creating an imaginary recipe, such as the recipe for a successful family vacation?

While a paper trimmer works great for cropping photos and cutting chunks of patterned paper, every scrapbooker needs a quality pair of scissors at her disposal. Scissors are very important for detail work. Without a sharp pair of scissors, creating a great layout is next to impossible.

I’ve tried many different types of scissors over the years, but my personal favorite is still the yellow Cutterbees from EK Success. For less than $10, they’re an absolute must-have. Just be careful not to accidentally poke yourself with the blade—they really are quite sharp!

Here’s another helpful scissor tip: if adhesive residue gums up your scissor blades, keep individually wrapped rubbing alcohol preps at your work area and wipe down the blades when they start to get sticky. The preps remove the gummy adhesive, and any remaining alcohol on the blades evaporates quickly as well.

Summer is the season for weddings and these happy occasions are lots of fun to scrapbook. When everyone is dressed in their best clothes, dancing, and having a good time, you can’t help but capture an awesome scrapbook page!

Here are some ideas for photos to take at the next wedding you attend:

• Guests signing the guest book
• Bride and groom dancing
• Bride and her father dancing
• Groom dancing with his mother
• Flower girl dancing with ring bearer
• Bride and groom cutting the cake
• The couple feeding the cake to each other
• Best man making the toast
• The couple visiting with family and friends
• Bride tossing the bouquet
• Groom tossing the garter
• Decorated getaway car
• Guests throwing rice or blowing bubbles
• Newlyweds waving goodbye as they leave for their honeymoon

For wedding scrapbook color schemes, I personally find black, white, and silver to be an awesome combination. You can find many wedding themed embellishments in this combo at your local scrapbook store. However, designing the page around the couple’s wedding color scheme is a great idea as well.

Can’t find the perfect background paper for your scrapbook layout? Try one of these fun ideas:

• Use rubber stamps and Versamark ink to create a custom watermarked background for your layout.
• Paint your own background on cardstock using chalks, watercolors, acrylic paint, or walnut ink. Use it to simply alter the look of existing cardstock or patterned paper or be unique and paint your own abstract design!
• Create a simple geometric background by layering circles or squares of different sizes and colors over your cardstock.
• Scan or color copy a piece of pretty piece of fabric and print your own custom patterned paper.
• Repeat simple journaling such as names and dates across cardstock for a unique and meaningful text background. Experiment with different fonts and ink colors for a variety of looks.
• Love the look of texture in your background cardstock? Create a grid by folding your paper and letting the creases add texture & dimension to your layout. Press down on the new creases for definition and add chalk or ink to enhance out the look.
• Cover your page in photos cropped with a small square punch to create a unique title page for your album.

Once you’ve been scrapbooking for awhile, many of the embellishments you find at your local craft store start to look the same.  So, you force yourself to get creative in the search for the next cool thing to jazz up your layout. Here are some of the unusual embellishments I’ve collected recently:

• A cake topper that says “Super Dad” for a Father’s Day page
• A Batman flying disc from a cereal box for a page about my son’s Batman costume
• Ribbon from a Bath and Body Works gift basket for a page about my favorite things
• Textured paint chips to use for a custom background
• A butterfly sticker that came with some junk mail

While collecting interesting odds and ends for your scrapbook is a fun frugal pastime, remember that not all of these items may be acid free. Use caution whenever you’re working with nontraditional supplies and irreplaceable family photos.

Stamping can be a great way to add frugal embellishments to your scrapbook layout. Invest in a set of alphabet stamps and some general floral or geometric designs to create an endless amount of looks for your scrapbooking projects.

Unfortunately, the technique of scrapbooking and rubber stamping does require a bit of practice. Stamping directly on your layout can be a nerve wracking experience. For this reason, I still prefer to stamp on a separate piece of cardstock, then glue it to my sheet. Then, if I make a mistake, I haven’t destroyed the entire project.

However, if you would like to include stamping on a layout but aren’t sure of the proper placement, apply chalk to the stamp and stamp where you’d like your image to appear. If you like what you see, use your regular inkpads. If not, just erase the image and start over!

If you’re a bit of a perfectionist, scrapbooking can sometimes seem like more of a chore than a fun and relaxing hobby. Instead of experimenting with new techniques and challenging yourself to use your supplies in a rewarding way, you may find yourself staring at a pretty piece of patterned paper too afraid to begin your project. If so, take a few deep breaths and RELAX!

Remember, it’s only paper. Although collecting scrapbook supplies can be quite fun, your purchases are useless if you don’t actually do anything with them. The supplies you love to look at in their packages will be much more enjoyable when they are in an album surrounded by your photos and journaling.

To overcome perfectionist tendencies when scrapbooking, try making a piece of collage wall art for your craft room. Grab your pile of scraps and try tearing, sanding, crinkling, stamping, punching, and gluing various shapes and colors together until you have a design that makes you happy. See where the project takes you, instead of trying to imitate a look you saw in the last issue of Creating Keepsakes.  When you’re done, I guarantee you’ll be ready to approach your next layout with a fresh perspective.

As someone with one son and no daughters, I must admit I used to be incredibly annoyed by the lack of cute scrapbook supplies with masculine themes. While glittery butterflies, pastel flowers, and cute pink ribbon bows are easy to find, searching for papers and embellishments to complete a boy’s scrapbook can be a much more challenging task.

Here are a few tips I’ve used when making pages for my son:

• Rough up your plain cardstock by inking the edges with brown charcoal ink.
• Try sanding white cord cardstock for a distressed look.
• Alter the colors of digital scrapbooking supplies in your favorite image editing software to make a feminine kit look more appropriate for your boy’s album.
• Look for companies such as Basic Grey that make scrapbook supplies that aren’t overly frilly and fussy.

If you’re dying to try some of the more feminine scrapbooking trends, such as floral embellishments, add them to your pages in a more gender neutral way. For example, a single dark brown felt flower is perfectly acceptable on a layout of your son playing in his sandbox on a bright spring day. However, a big bouquet of pink silk flowers could definitely be considered overkill.

In scrapbooking, rules are made to be broken. Part of the fun of creating a special book to document your personal history is that your work is totally unique. Your scrapbook should be an expression of your thoughts, feelings, and talents – not a carbon copy of some idea that happens to be trendy at the moment.

Novice scrapbookers are often under the impression that there are certain guidelines one must follow to make a layout. I’ve heard people say you can’t mix one and two page layouts in the same album, that every page must have both a title and journaling, and that all of your photos must be matted. This is completely not true. There are many different ways to scrapbook. If you love a fresh and contemporary look, you can make graphic designed inspired pages that look like hip advertisements. However, if you prefer vintage charm, there are plenty of options for old-fashioned pages as well. The only “right” way to scrapbook is to do what makes you happy!

In keeping with yesterday’s post about making your scrapbook a more realistic depiction of your life, here are some themes for pages that cover more than the obvious topics:

• Fashion mishaps throughout the years (how you found your personal style)
• A history of failed romances (the story of all your bad breakups)
• Parenting is not what it seems (the struggles of trying to raise your children)
• How could I have been so stupid? (a brief overview of bad decisions you’ve made and how you learned from them)
• My pet peeves (a place to vent abut things that annoy you)
• Random facts about me (bits of trivia that others may not know)
• Fears (either silly or serious)