Tips for Scrapbooking Beginners - Where to Start

by: Paula McDonald

Taking Pictures
The first thing a potential scrapbooker should know is how to take a good picture, as the vast majority of scrapbooks are centered around our photographs. Visit our photography page for specific tips on taking pictures.

Photo Storage
I have found that the system that works best for me is to store my not-so-great pictures in those inexpensive photo storage boxes (in chronological order). All of my other pictures go into regular photo albums immediately after being developed so I can keep them in order. Then, as I update my scrapbook, I simply flip through the album and decide which pictures are scrapbook worthy. Since using a digital camera, I sometimes order extras that I know will be used in my scrapbook so that another copy can stay in the regular album.

Scrapbook Design
After gathering and organizing your pictures, the next step is to decide what theme you want for your scrapbook. You could create one for a child's life, a wedding, vacations, family, or any specific theme that ties your pictures together. Personally, I have a scrapbook for the 1st year of life for each of my two daughters, and continue to add pages to additional scrapbooks to capture memories as they happen chronologically.

Photo Selection
Once you have decided on a theme for your scrapbook, select several pictures to be grouped on each page. The most popular size scrapbook is 12x12, which usually holds about 3 pictures plus journaling, though this is extremely flexible. Sometimes, a special picture might be placed alone on a page with more embellishments, or many cropped (trimmed) pictures can be squeezed on. There are no rules!

Cropping Photos
Most scrapbookers like to crop their pictures. Cropping is cutting out any distracting or unnecessary background to focus on your subject. This is best done using a personal paper trimmer, which makes a quick, clean, level cut.

Choosing Paper
After cropping your pictures, the next step is usually deciding on background paper and mat paper for your page. (I say usually because, again, there are not rules. You may decide not to use a mat for your photo, or use several or no papers for your background.) The background paper can be chosen by theme (for example, holly paper for a Christmas layout) or you can select papers that complement the colors of your photos. For example, if your child is wearing a purple hat and you want to emphasize it, mat your photos on matching purple paper (and find a background paper to complement).
Journaling

Descriptive text added to expand on the layout is called a journal block. This can be handwritten or done on the computer, and adds a personal touch besides complementing the photos to present a complete collection of memories for the layout. When journaling, focus on answering the "who-what-when-where-why" questions of your photos.
Embellishment

Embellishments such as die-cuts (cardstock cut into various shapes), stickers, eyelets, fibers, glitter, etc. can be added to really give your layout some "punch". Let your creative juices flow!
You can find many the scrapbooking items you'll need at http://www.bayoupizzazz.com/catalog/index.php.

About The Author
Paula McDonald is an avid scrapbooker, a stay-at-home-mom, and owner of Bayou Pizzazz Scrapbook Supply. Her online scrapbooking store can be found at http://www.bayoupizzazz.com/catalog/index.php.

10 Themes for Scrapbooking

by: Jacqueline M. Schimmel

There are so many reasons out there to scrapbook! For one, it’s history, right? And it’s important for us to remember and cherish these memories, especially for our generations to follow. I would have been so thrilled had my mother saved stories to go along with all her photos. She still keeps my baby photos and photos of her and her family in shoeboxes. Awful thought isn’t it?

Well, we all have those tons of photos of our ancestors, at least most of us do, but there are so many other memories to cherish besides family trees. How about a baby’s first year? You can document month-by-month how your baby is growing and all the things he or she is learning. This makes a great present come wedding time.

Apropo wedding, of course you’ll want to save your precious wedding memories. Not only the professional photos, but also those of the reception, the church, maybe even your engagement party. There are subthemes such as the ring, the dress, the bride, the groom, the kiss, etc. There are entire lists!

What about your vacations! You don’t want to just slap these photos in a regular album! That would be a waste! You’ll want to share your story about where you went, what you saw and did, right? Names, places, dates are all very important for scrapbooking. That is the reason we scrapbook, to tell our story! The same goes for holidays, such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, etc.

Do you have any pets? There are so many cute ideas and embellishments for pet pages out there. It is incredible! I’ve scrapped my big red tabby cat Pooky and made really adorable memory pages. To some people, pets are like children!

Ever remodeled an old house and have shot before and after pictures? Now, there’s a super scrapping idea. You can journal in all of the work you’ve done to restore the house, how long it took, and any blunders that occurred along the way!

Scrap your feelings about something. There doesn’t even have to be a picture on the page, just use your imagination and create a nice layout using just your words and emotions. It’s kind of like writing in your diary, except it might be something you’ll want to show someone else. So keep it clean! What about your hobbies? I’ve made scrapbook pages about scrapbooking!
Just a few more to get you going: graduation/school years and your job (in case it’s worth scrapping). Have FUN scrapping!!!

About The Author
Jacqueline Schimmel is a Professional Scrapbook Designer and the name of her business is Memories Artwork located at http://www.memoriesartwork.com. All information stated is copyright of Memories Artwork.

Make Your Scrapbooking Efforts Easier With a Journal

by: Vera Raposo

(We would love to give you a journaling-tip to help you along.....)

Journals are a great way to keep track of dates, places, and events that you wish to include in your scrapbooks. You can use a special notebook, PDA, or a calendar to keep track of your scrapbooking ideas.

A journal is also a wonderful way to remember special times in the lives of your friends and family. Amusing thoughts and sentimental feelings can be recorded in your journal to give you ideas for captioning and titles in your scrapbooks.

It is important to keep your journal current. This will save you a lot of time when creating your scrapbook pages. You can write the dates and times of family outings and special occasions such as visits to the zoo, visits from grandparents and other relatives, and make notes as to what each person experienced during these times.

Scrapbooks are more than simple photo albums. They are a chronological history of the places and people that shape our lives.

A journal can keep new scrapbooking ideas fresh in your mind and help you keep your supplies and materials organized.

You do not have to write detailed accounts of every minute of your life in your journal, but instead interesting thoughts and occurrences that will make exciting additions to your scrapbooks and keep memories close at hand.

You can use the information kept in your journal to assist you in organizing your photos in regard to dates and places where the photos were taken, a place to jot down new ideas for scrapbooking themes, and help you keep track of ongoing projects. A journal is very helpful to both casual and professional scrapbookers.

About The Author
Vera Raposo has been scrapbooking since her oldest child was 5. With tons of scrapbooking tips and ideas, Vera is now sharing some of her best scrapbooking ideas for your new baby in her newsletter http://www.baby-scrapbooking.com.

Scrapbooking And The Use Of Digital Photography

by: Vera Raposo

Digital photography has made scrapbooking easier than ever before.
Digital cameras allow you to view your pictures immediately instead of
waiting hours or days for film to be developed.

You will also know if you have captured the perfect shot as soon as you take it and you can discard unwanted pictures right away instead of wasting time and money having your film developed only to discover that half your pictures did not turn out the way you had intended.
Digital photographs can be uploaded to your computer immediately and
most photo editing software includes various borders, cropping tools, and
the ability to include captions.

Digital photos can be stored indefinitely and you may choose to have them made into a CD Rom as an extra measure of safety. You will be able to edit, touch up, and alter your photos as you see fit in just minutes thanks to the convenience of photo editing software.

Digital cameras have become inexpensive and some brands even offer disposable digital cameras that can be used once and developed into pictures or a CD Rom at your local retailers.
Having access to your photos in digital form will allow you to be as
creative as you wish in creating unique scrapbooks.

You may print your photos from your computer using special photo printing paper or create online scrapbooks that you can share with the world in an instant. You will only be limited by your imagination when you use digital photos in your scrapbooks.

For those who have never owned or used a digital camera, have no fear. You can take digital photos with the same ease as a conventional camera, and you will be delighted to see your pictures displayed immediately on your camera screen.

About The Author
Vera Raposo has been scrapbooking since her oldest child was 5. With tons of scrapbooking tips and ideas, Vera is now sharing some of her best scrapbooking ideas for your new baby in her newsletter http://www.baby-scrapbooking.com.

Free Scrapbooking Ideas – How To Become A Scrapbooking Expert Without Spending A Dime!

by: Caroline Smith

For free scrapbooking ideas the Internet is a great place to look. There are some excellent sites full of creative tips and suggestions to help you make your own unique scrapbooks. If you’re looking for an original way to organize your favorite photos, arranging them in special scrapbook albums could be the solution. Scrapping is a very popular hobby, and offers a wonderful way to preserve your treasured memories for posterity. It’s an enjoyable and addictive pastime that allows you to use your imagination and add your personal touches to your pages.
Ready made scrapbook kits can be really good, particularly if you are making a themed scrapbook, such as for a wedding, a vacation or the birth of a baby. Pre-packaged kits come in a huge range of themes, and contain a selection of coordinated materials such as cardstock, stencils, frames or stickers. One advantage of using a kit to create your scrapbooking layouts is that it saves you the time of having to choose your supplies separately, making it quicker and simpler to design your pages. If you’ve got a digital camera, then there are some good digital scrapbooking software packages that enable you to use your computer to try out different looks. You can play around with all kinds of things, from templates to font styles.

There are many other free scrapbook ideas online, and loads of artistic ways of adding embellishments to your pages. In addition to using stickers, there are all sorts of paper piecing patterns; die cuts and other accessories that can help add color and style to your page. As well as using photographs and other visual images, many scrappers like to use words to enhance the meaning of the pictures. Journaling is a great way to record your memories and feelings related to the events in the photos. You may want to add scrapbooking quotes or poems, where appropriate, to help bring the stories to life. This can work well in both chronological or heritage scrapbooks, as well as in other types of albums.

If you’re looking for new ways to display your photos and memorabilia in scrapbooks, the Internet can be an excellent source of inspiration!

About The Author
Caroline Smith is an author and regular contributor to http://www.free-scrapbooking-ideas.com - An online resource packed with hints and tips for every scrapbooking enthusiast.

Organizing Your Scrapbook Space To Help Your At Home Scrapbooking Business

by: Colleen Shiach

How do you keep all those scrapbooking supplies organized to run your scrapbooking company efficiently. Here are several helpful tips to keep your scrapbooking business organized and efficient. In this article we will cover, theme items, fibers, ribbon and paper.

There are an endless number of tools and supplies that help us turn plain pages into works of art for our customers. But organizing and storing all those wonderful embellishments we use to create with can be challenging. Spending time digging through drawers and boxes looking for supplies is frustrating and time consuming and time is money. There are simple and inexpensive ways to help you spend less time searching for your supplies and more time exactly creating.
Sorting supplies by categories or themes is very useful and you can tell at a glance what you have in stock. Some useful categories are Winter, Christmas, Easter, Valentines, Baby girl, Baby boy, etc. Create interesting labels using 2”x 4” address labels and your computer. You can have fun with this too by adding small graphics and matching the font to your business cards.
Be sure to save all those scrap pieces of paper into themes also. A great item for this are those accordion style keepers available at most office supply stores and 12”x 12” Paper Envelopes by Cropper Hopper. By saving all those scraps of paper you can use them to make die cuts and punches to match those wonderful pages you are creating.

What to do with all those fibers and ribbons ? Place fibers in small plastic bags and store them in your theme containers. Smaller plastic containers work great to store fibers by colors. You can also use recycled clear jars, cleaned and labels removed, and sort by color. Add your creative labels to these also. Photo boxes are a great size for holding spools of ribbon and these come in clear also. Another great solution is to hang a pretty curtain rod on your wall and thread those ribbon spools on the curtain rod.

Paper is one of the most important staples and storage is also a major problem for most at home scrap booking businesses. Paper comes in hundreds of different colors, patterns, textures and weights. It needs to be kept dry and clean, be photo safe and stored in plain sight. Paper can be stored in a wide variety of ways but horizontal is the best. There are lots of wonderful products out there, from wire storage racks to clear stacking plastic trays and are a very good investments.

About The Author
Colleen Shiach had been scrapbooking on and off for 10 years when she decided to start her own company in 2004. Colleen now owns and operates Colleen’s Memory Albums, a scrapbook for hire service that carries pre made scrapbook pages and albums, scrapbook supplies, tears and handmade embellishments. Check out her website at www.colleensmemoryalbums.com.

Scrapbooking by: Scott Bianchi

I never realized how big the scrapbooking industry was until recently. When researching hobbies for my website I learned just how big it was. My website is designed as an on-line shopping mall. Hobbies are a big part of many people’s lives so it made sense to me to have a hobbies page. Scrapbooking is easily the hobby I have the most information about on my site. This is not because I favor it, there is just a tremendous amount of information available for this particular hobby.

What is scrapbooking? It is essentially a much more extravagant photo album. A plain photo album is just that, an album with some pictures on some white pages. A scrapbook has different pages, stickers, themes, and sometimes even tells a story. If you go to your nearest arts and crafts store you will most likely discover aisles and aisles of supplies. They have stamps, special scissors to make different kinds of edges, other kinds of cutting apparatus, every conceivable kind of magic marker you could ever need with different tips, widths, and colors.

My wife recently got into this hobby. She and a friend get together usually once a week to do scrapbooking. Their supplies call my downstairs closet home. They have big Rubbermaid tote buckets full of this stuff. Surprisingly enough, most of the supplies are not all that expensive. My wife’s current project is my daughters first year. She has it broken down by birth, and each month leading up to her first birthday. I have to say that it is like art work the way it is done. I am not just saying it because it is my wife’s either, I mean in general. I have seen other scrap books and they are equally as impressive. This is why I said earlier that you can actually tell a story with these books, without using words. Just by how the pages are set up and some of the stickers and other supplies that are available you can tell a great story. This hobby does take a lot of planning and patience but the finished product makes it worth it.

Not only is there my wife’s form of scrapbooking but in this world of technology you can scrapbook on-line. You can do your pages electronically and then load them on the internet for other people to view. I know much less about how this medium actually works but it was worth mentioning to anyone learning about this topic for the first time.

If you were to do a search on Google for scrapbooking you will find the following link in one of the first few results: http://scrapbooking.about.com/. In reading the first paragraph in this article you will get an idea for just how big scrapbooking is, people plan retreats and cruises with other scrapbookers.

If you are reading this article because you are looking to start a new hobby you may really want to review the above link in great detail. It provides a lot of information to someone looking to get started. If you are already an avid scrapbooker then hopefully you can provide me with some sites you find very helpful. With all the sites available to cover this subject I would never have enough time to review them all. Please email me any sites I may find helpful to host on my hobbies page.

About The Author
Scott Bianchi operates http://www.best-internet-bargains.com. He writes on a variety of topics. If you would like to be added to his distribution list for his new articles when they are published just send an email to articles@bestinternetbargains.com.
scottbianchi@hotmail.com

Scrapbooking As A Lifeline

Sometimes memories are all you have.My family is at a difficult stage of life right now, as my 80-year-old mother is showing increasing levels of dementia. She needs to be reminded where she is, what we’re doing, whom she is with—even what she likes—and she’s fond of telling tales from long, long ago—sometimes repeating the same stories ten minutes later.

I am especially grateful now that she had let me start scrapbooking her huge stash of family pictures over a year ago. The stories and details she shared with me as we sorted the pictures at that time have become so much more than just journaling facts for our family history. As she recedes into her long-term memories, the information she shared while still in the world of reality have given me a way to relate with her that I didn’t have before.

When I originally sat down with her to gather this information, I confess that it was not for her sake, but to save those identities & family histories from being lost forever, so I could include them for our family heritage. I had no way of knowing then that God wasn’t just saving them for a faceless future—He was preparing for a time when Mom would need someone to connect with. He gave me that information as a gift of connection with my Mom so she won’t be alone in her memories in her final years.So now, I can guide her as she retells the stories, and what a delight to see her face light up as she recalls the scenes again. This was a benefit I did not expect from scrapbooking—but it is certainly one I welcome, and I encourage you to scrapbook your aging relatives’ lives not just for the future—but to be able to minister with those same stories. And if you are not a scrapbooker yourself, there are professional scrapbook artists who will take the information you gather and put it in book form--but the important thing I discovered with my Mom is that the process was so much more important than the finished product.

About the Author:Kate Rothacker is a mom, wife, daughter, & sister, which gives her plenty of material to scrapbook--but requests by friends and family led her begin to scrapbook professionally for others. She also leads weekend scrapbooking events, teaches workshops, & creates custom designs under the name Local Memories Scrapbook Services (http://www.localmemories.com/).Read more articles by: Kate Rothacker

Getting Started On Your Frugal Scrapbook

Photos:
• Go through your photos your old photo albums, shoe boxes, or from your digital pictures stored on your PC. • Separate your photos into smaller categories such as year, special events, individual children, holidays, vacations, birthdays, etc.• Pick your best photos. If you like, choose a theme. Choose 4 to 8 of the best shots.• Choosing a focal point. From the 4-8 best photos, pick your absolute favorite as a focal photo. • Arrange the photos on a page. Don't make everything symmetrical. It's okay to tilt the photos and overlap a little. This adds interest to the page
Layout:
• Choose a theme for your pages, such as birthday, season, wedding etc... • It’s best to start with a solid background, then build on top of that.• Choose a color scheme of 2-3 prominent colors from the focal photo to use as a color scheme for your layout.• Choose a coordinating (I like to call) “back-drop” for your picture(s). Use the decorative scissors to trim the sides if the “back-drop”.
Embelish:
• Here’s the fun part. • Decorate your page with stickers, or those cool caption stickers. • Die cuts. You can also make your own die cuts out of cardstock scrap.• Ribbons, old jewelry can even be used. • Old invitations. Party decorations. • Use old scraps of cardstock and put on all 4 corners of the page.• One thick piece of cardstock which is a 3 inches wide the length of your page, and position on the either side of the page. • Or, take a piece of cardstock that is about 3 inches wide and the width of your page and position at the top or the bottom of your page. • Use these areas for your journal.• Make a pocket page and store love notes or old movie stubbs.
Fix it to the Page:
• Once you have everything in place just the way you like it, you can use a hot glue gun or acid-free stick glue, but don’t glue it until you're happy with the layout.
Journalize:
• Tell a story about the people in the photos. Where they were, be sure to include dates.• Use cardstock or color coordinating paper to write your story then place close by the photo, or on a designated page of it’s own.
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About the Author:
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Review: DJ Inkers: Still a favorite!

DJ Inkers launched their link of scrapbook and stamping products around 1994 in the wee infancy of scrapbooking. Their style emits beautiful charm to many a scrapbook. Their best products that I've used are clip art. Used for my son's scrapbook, they are screaming "CUTE"! All of their clip art can be seen on their website but I love checking out their sales page! You can find items marked down by more than 60%! This website is a MUST SEE for all scrapbookers if you are working on baby items. This is more than just a scrapbooking site, I see their images on baby announcements and shower gifts. As my children have grown past the cute stage, I still love using their items as gifts for parents of younger children. They have great customer service and normally have items in stock.

If you are looking for ideas, you do have to search a little harder on the DJ Inkers Website. The ideas page is not just for scrapbookers. A host of other party and gift ideas are there with pictures. They update this page periodically.

Welcome to Scraptageous

I started scrapbooking in 1994 when there were only a handful of companies around. Since then, there are a wave of new ideas and new ways to scrapbook. No longer are we bound to make traveling adventures outside to wonderous places six hundred miles away! Now, we have scrapbook shops around every corner. The internet is FULL of scrapbooking wonderlands! This website will hopefully help all of you discover the wonderful world of scrapping. I scour the internet in search of the great deals and post them here! Scrapbooking is fun, rewarding, and a great way to preserve your WONDERFUL memories for years to come. Hope you enjoy my ever changing website! Please visit often!