Cheap & Easy Scrapbooking
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Why Choose Scrapbooking as a Hobby?
Scrapbooking is one of today's most popular hobbies or crafts. Why? Scrapbooks, whether paper or digital, are one of the best ways to preserve photographs and other memories of a person's life and family. While today's scrappers base their scrapbooks on photographs of special events in their lives or the lives of their family members, scrapbooks were being made long before the advent of photography.
So why choose scrapbooking for a hobby? The main reason to choose scrapbooking for a hobby is to provide a history of one's life and special events. While the popularity of scrapbooking has skyrocketed in the past several years, people have been keeping scrapbooks for many centuries. Scrapbook fans are essentially historians who keep and preserve the special events of their lives. So scrapbooking has been a historically important craft for a very long time.
People have been keeping some sort of scrapbook for hundreds of years. Starting in the 1400s, many recipes, letters, poems and other important pieces of paper were saved in albums. Early scrapbooking crafters collected their precious memorabilia and attached their memories to pieces of paper. These pieces of paper were later made into albums by combining the individual pages together.
Early scrappers saved bits of information on many of the same types of information that modern scrapbooking fans do. Renaissance era scrapbooking fans kept information on their favorite people, poems, pictures and trips. One of the rites of passage for a young person in those days was to take a European tour in their late teens or early twenties. Young, wealthy people who traveled through Europe collected colored plates with pictures of local coats of arms, famous places or famous events to put in their albums as souvenirs of their trips.
During the 1700s and 1800s scrapbooks were kept of school subjects and school friends. Girls kept a record of their writing skills, whether prose or poetry, in scrapbooks. They also kept scrapbook albums of their friends and school activities. While many young people kept journals of their personal history, keeping an album of pictures and other souvenirs was an important activity for many young people. Thus scrapbooking has been an important way for people to express themselves and keep their personal and family histories recorded through the ages.
When newspapers became available, newspaper clippings were added to scrapbooking albums as an important part of recording the important events in a person's life. The next advancement in scrapbook albums came when cameras and photographs became easily accessible to the public in the late 1880s. George Eastman's invention of the Kodak Brownie made photographs available to anyone who could afford to buy a camera. Thus, photographs began to be added to scrapbooks as pictorial records.
Today, scrapbooking is so popular most department stores carry huge assortments of scrapbooking supplies. And as history shows, you don't need to use only photographs for your scrapbooks, you can use any manner of things that mean something to you.
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Do you have photographs around the house in drawers and shoeboxes? Most of us do. But you can't enjoy your precious photographs if they are lying around in drawers, boxes, and in disorganized piles. Get them organized so you can enjoy them by putting them in a scrapbook. You can put them in chronological order, from the earliest times to the most recent photographs, or you can group them by theme, event or person. Be sure to use
acid-free paper, glue and embellishments to preserve your memories. Especially be sure to use acid-free ink to label and date each photo for future reference.
A person's entire life can be chronicled in a scrapbook. If you are a parent or grandparent, you can use scrapbooking to keep a history of your child or grandchild's life. And because most communication and photos are shared electronically these days, sharing information via email is a great way to collect photos and newspaper articles to use in a scrapbook.
If the thought of chronicling a person's entire life seems like too much for you, consider scrapbooking a person's life year by year. Parents would certainly enjoy receiving an album per year of each of their child's life as a priceless, much treasured gift.
Did you or your family go on a special vacation recently? Think about saving souvenirs for a travel scrapbook to make when you return. The basis for each page can be pictures taken of places you visited while travelling. The album can be of one trip, or of the travel history of a family. If you know you are going to go on a trip, you can collect post cards and other bits of memorabilia as you travel to include in your scrapbook. When you return from your trip, you can re-live the good times and exciting places you experienced on your travels.
Scrapbooks are great ways to keep the memories of special events that occur in you or your child's life. You may become the family historian by being the family scrapper. Baptisms, Bar Mitzvahs, concerts, parties, birthdays, weddings, and family reunions are only a few of the many reasons to scrapbook. Whether choosing a category or theme for a scrapbook, or chronicling a life through pictures, scrapbooking is an important part of preserving history.
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What Are Scrapbooking Embellishments?
There are thousands of different types of embellishments available for scrapbooking. But before you start shopping for scrapbook embellishments you should decide on a theme for your scrapbook, then choose the photos that you will use as the basis for each page. Use this theme and photos to help choose the embellishments you will use. Just be sure to use some common sense when choosing your supplies at your local craft or department store so you don't go overboard.Perhaps you have done other types of crafts and already have a stash of craft materials available to you around the house. You could use some of these items for embellishments. Buttons, lace, drawing paper and photograph mats are fine for use in your scrapbook, especially if the material is acid-free. You could have a hoard of items at home and not even know it, so make sure you check all of your drawers and cupboards. If you are an expert in calligraphy, you may be able to do your own lettering on each page. If you are doing a scrapbook about babies and have a baby yourself, maybe you have some small baby items that you can use on a scrapbook page.
So you've decided on a theme for your scrapbook and you've found a couple of treasures in drawers around the house to use as embellishments or mats on your scrapbook pages, but you still want to add more detail and novelties. Head to the scrapbooking department of your local craft store to buy more scrapbooking materials if need be, but remember to keep check of how much you are spending as it is still much cheaper to make your own embellishments.
When you reach the scrapbooking section of your local store you will find a plethora of different types and colors of paper from which to choose. Choose paper that will complement the pictures you have chosen for the basis of your album pages. Remember not to choose paper that will detract from the subject of your page. Once you have chosen the right paper, choose embellishments that will coordinate with the paper and photographs you have chosen, and any other embellishments you found or made at home.
There are both flat and 3D embellishments available for your scrapbooking use. These embellishments come in a huge variety of themes to choose from. If you already have the photos and paper chosen, you will have automatically narrowed down the color choices of the types of stickers and other embellishments you can choose. Choose embellishments for a page or two at a time if choosing for an entire album seems overwhelming.
And most importantly, take your time. Yes that's right, take your time. There is no rush to buy every single item on the shelves, as over time you will end up with huge collections of items without even realizing it. So take it slow, take it steady and take it easy, but remember to have fun!
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How to Make Your Own Scrapbook Embellishments
Or better yet, why not cheat and see what you may already have at your disposal. With scrapbooking you can be as creative as you like. There are no hard and fast rules about what to use or how to use it. And not everyone can afford to continually buy new embellishment supplies.
One of the most popular do-it-yourself embellishments is memorabilia. These can be ticket stubs, playbooks, programs, pamphlets, brochures, or any assortment of mementoes or souvenirs that one would usually bring back from somewhere special. Birthday cards, gift cards or even floral cards could be used. Also, keep an eye out in the local newspaper for school events or achievements, your own children could be stars.
Try to get as organized as possible with all of the memorabilia that you'll be collecting so you can find things when you want to use them. Possibly separate items into labeled envelopes or small baskets for each event or period of time. Make sure you let everyone in the family know what types of things you are collecting so they can help out.
For more informal and day-to-day photos look for items around the house. Wine bottle corks can be cut into slices, colored post-it notes with special words on them, fridge magnets you no longer want on the fridge, a deceased cat's collar, "student of the week" certificates, used stamps, this list could go on and on. Basically, you could use almost anything that would sit flat enough on a page (as long as the glue held).
When creating your pages lay everything you want to use down on the page before gluing it so you get a good idea of how the final page will look. You could also add captions, dates and even Smilies with colored pens.
When you pair these items up with your own photos they make wonderful keepsakes. But if you lay them out on a scrapbook page and make them into an event, they make memories.
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Choosing the Right Scrapbook
If scrapbooking has really tweaked your interest and you're keen to get started, your very first purchase needs to be the actual scrapbook that you will use. But what type of scrapbook should you buy? Don't stress over this too much as the scrapbooks themselves are fairly straight forward, your only decision should be on the size and quality of the cover.
There are a few different sizes to choose from with the most popular being the 12 x 12 inch and the 8 ½ x 11 inch scrapbooks. Choosing one of these popular sizes will make it easier to find supplies like borders and new pages. These scrapbooks usually come with a minimum number of pages and allow you to add more as you go along.
The larger size 12 x 12 inch scrapbook and paper are a bit more expensive but they allow you to fit more onto the page. But most people choose a scrapbook and pages that are the same size as what their home printer takes so they can design their pages on a computer and print out the pages before adding embellishments. These sizes are usually the Letter size if you're in the US or A4 if you're in Australia or the UK.
An added advantage of using these standard paper sizes is that you can walk into any office supply or department store and readily find them without any problems.
Another thing to look at is the scrapbook's binding. You should try to avoid the spiral bound scrapbooks as they will not let you add new pages and you will be limited to the number of pages that are already in the scrapbook. Always look for the scrapbooks with the removable pages so you can add more pages when you need to and also rearrange pages if you want to make any changes.
Covers come in all manner of colors and styles so the choice is up to you as to what you would prefer, though a nice strong cover will definitely last longer. Look for thicker cardboard or even plastic-coated covers.
Choosing the right scrapbook for your needs is fairly straight forward once you know a few basics and feel confident about making these choices. So get scrapping and have fun.
Visitor Feedback
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K-A-T
Nov 8, 2009 @ 5:20 pm | in reply to Tipi | delete
- Thanks Susie, I've been scrapbooking for years so thought I should now start writing about it.
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Tipi
Nov 6, 2009 @ 9:50 pm | delete
- Scape-booking is interesting to me.
Keep up the good work!
Susie
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K-A-T
Nov 5, 2009 @ 10:06 pm | delete
- I'm going to be the first one to leave a "Blurb" on this lens, wonder if I'll approve myself - LOL! Please leave any comments below as I am looking forward to hearing feedback on this lens. Thanks.
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