How To Get Started With Scrapbooking

Whenever a big event happens in our lives, we grab a camera and take lots of pictures to put in our photo album. But there is a growing hobby that is being adopted by many more people every single day, and that hobby is scrapbooking. This hobby is doing away with the process of filing photographs away in an album, and taking them to a whole new level by adding extra elements to them to ensure that the memories are kept in much sharper focus.

The great thing about scrapbooking is that it enables you to create themed books that relate to different occasions. You could do a book dedicated to a friend’s wedding and give it to the bride and groom as a wedding gift. Another idea is to make one for your parents, showing them a range of photos from when you and your siblings were growing up. This would also make an ideal gift for Christmas or a birthday.

The possibilities with scrapbooking are endless – in essence they are limited only by your imagination.

Using Different Materials To Create Different Effects

Sometimes it’s good to create a certain mood when you are displaying your photos in a scrapbook. For example, photos that are taken at a certain time of year can be embellished as such. Seasonal pictures of your family opening their presents at Christmas can be surrounded by cut outs of trees, gifts and holly and ivy. You can also use stencilled lettering to add messages or notes to the pictures, as well as noting the date on which they were taken.

Scrapbooking allows you to add far more detail to your pictures than a standard photo album allows. You would often be restricted to writing the date on the back of the print, but with a scrapbook you don’t have to do this. You can also include notes on who is in the picture and what was happening. Embellishments will add to the overall theme of the photos and can transform a simple set of pictures into something really special.

Stocking Up On Craft Items

As you begin to delve deeper into the art of scrapbooking, you will start to build a collection of papers, rubber stamps, lettering, stickers, stencils and much more that you can use when adding a page to an existing scrapbook, or creating a completely new one. If you are new to the hobby of scrapbooking it can be worthwhile to buy a few ready-made kits, which usually include a variety of materials that adhere to a specific theme.

You can personalise your scrapbooks even more by including items other than photos in them. For example, if you want to create a scrapbook devoted to your summer holiday, be sure to keep anything related to it, such as brochures, tickets, and any other paperwork that could be used when you eventually make the scrapbook itself. If you go skiing you could keep the cable car ticket to tuck halfway underneath a picture of you on the cable car itself. This all adds further depth to your scrapbook and makes it more of a memory book than if you included nothing but the actual photos.

In short, scrapbooking makes more of our photos than an album would. The fact that we can add as much or as little to them as we wish makes them extremely versatile, and a great gift for someone else – either as a starter kit or completed by you as a memory of a specific occasion.

Finally, keep everything you can lay your hands on that you think might be good for a future page in your scrapbook. You never know when that bus ticket, cinema ticket or receipt for that romantic meal might find a place in your scrapbook.