The Basic Tools You Need to Begin Your Scrapbook Projects
- Organization box
- Album- Album Pages
- Page Protectors
- Photo safe adhesive
- Photo trimmer (Straight cutter, corner maker, scissors)
- Photo safe pen for Journaling
Now that your photos are organized, next you need to decide which ones are going where on the page. Planning out your page before you stick anything down permanently can help you avoid headaches down the road. Planning includes deciding which photos you are going to use, which papers best suite those photos, and which photos you need to crop to get the best impact of your page design. If you are stuck for a layout idea there are many websites, books and magazines that help to inspire you, just be careful that they don’t overwhelm you too much. Another great way to get ideas for your pages is by joining a scrapbook group or getting together with friends who enjoy this hobby and work together on your projects. Sometimes you just need that sounding board that another person can provide.
Helpful Hint: When choosing paper for your page, choose colours that will enhance your photo (make them pop!), not take the focus away from them.
Cropping your photos can be a useful way of highlighting the focus of the portrait. I remember the first time someone told me to crop my photos. I thought they were nuts! I mean the very idea of cutting up your precious photos! (This is another very good reason why you should work with copies of your photos and not the originals). I soon discovered that cropping a photo can make a dramatic impact. By cropping you can take out the “noise” or unwanted objects in a photo and leave only that what you want to display.
Okay, so you’ve got your photos on your page, accented with embellishments to highlight your photos, but you still have another very important thing to do. What could that be you ask? Journaling. I know there are some of us (myself included) that don’t particularly jump at this but it is so important to do. Journaling allows you to tell the story behind the photos you so carefully took the time to display in your album. Journaling can be very basic from simply the date (month, year), location (Picnic at Niagara-on-the-Lake), to what is actually going on in the photo. Having a photo of people acting silly in the living room may not mean much to a future generation but if you write a little blurb stating that the family is practising the Gay Gordon for the daughters upcoming wedding and had a goofy good time at doing it, well that tells you a little more then what you see in the photo itself. Also including the names of the people in the photo is very important. How many of us have a heritage photo of a “family member” but no one seems to know who it is? Yup, I’ve got a few of those too. Wouldn’t it be nice to know who that person was? Well, now you can help avoid this problem for future generations by simply including the individual’s names in your journaling.
If you are concerned about making spelling mistakes you could always type your journaling on the computer and use a spell check program to help avoid mistakes. I do this often myself because even though I have two university degrees and am working on the next, my spelling and grammar are terrible at times. I personally prefer to hand write my journaling so I keep my laptop beside me while I work and use it as my dictionary to check the spelling on certain words before I write them down. And heck, if I make a mistake it just makes my album more uniquely mine and shows to others I am not perfect and spelling is not my forte.
The very last step you need to do is protect your work. You put so much time and energy into your project it would be a shame to have it ruined by a toddlers sticky fingers or someone spilling something on it. To protect your pages use page protectors. Some albums (the kind where you slide your page into a sleeve) you do not need to purchase extra page protectors because the sleeve already does the protecting. But for those who purchased albums where you have pages with no protections I would strongly encourage you to make this simple investment to preserve your memories.
Please remember one thing, scrapbooks can either be decorative or plain, whatever format you choose is absolutely fine. It’s your album, make it yours by doing it your way and don’t let anyone tell you different.
