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Scrapbooking For Beginners
Scrapbooking is a wonderfully creative and popular way to preserve memories. Today you can find websites, magazines, craft shows on television and entire stores dedicated to scrapbooking. Instead of just a bunch of photos that are meaningless unless someone understands what was going on at the moment, photos and mementos are grouped together with titles, phrases and fun descriptions to help give them a history.
The whole point of memory books is to tell the story behind the pictures. This way, if someone is looking at your scrapbook while you're not available to explain the photos, they can tell what was going on.
For example, say you have a photo of your child at the beach. Anyone else looking at that photo sees just that... a child at the beach. But by putting that photo on a scrapbook page with related background paper, a title like "Our Day at Newport" and a few mementos like a small seashell or a little clear envelope of beach sand and a nice caption of what that day was like makes that photo into a history that can be shared.
If you've never scrapbooked before, it isn't too difficult. Like any new hobby, it may take a little practice to build your confidence with designing your pages. Until then, you can buy kits of coordinated accessories to decorate your pages and gives you templates, or you can find templates online to guide you. If you still want to design your own page, sketch out a plan to see how it may look before you start pasting your elements together.
The basic equipment you need to have on hand includes a paper cutter (preferably 12 inches long), archival quality adhesive, acid-free cardstock and decorative paper and an archival quality black pen.
Archival quality generally means acid-free, and that they won't harm any of the contents of the page in any way. For example, glue that contains water may cause the paper to warp or wrinkle, and pens that are not archive quality may bleed around the edges or soak through.
Later you can add cool toys to help you cut special edges and make fancy textures and embossed patterns.
Some people use original photos on their memory album pages. Others scan them into the computer and print duplicates. They feel that if they cut the duplicate and it doesn't look as nice as they hoped, they can just print out another while keeping the original safe.
You will want to organize your photos into themes for your scrapbooks. Holidays, birthdays, pets, or creating one for each child showing how they grow are many suggestions you can use in organizing your photos.
For more assistance in learning how best to organize your photo albums, join a class at your local craft or scrapbooking store. You can also join scrapbooking email lists and forums, where you are likely to find a lot of support and assistance in learning new skills. You can also learn how to use some of those cute themed stickers and three-dimensional decorations.
No matter how you get started, scrapbooking can be a long lasting enjoyable hobby. Don't be afraid to jump in and give it a try.
