If you can take pictures with your camera then you are already on your way to creating a beautiful scrapbook. What good are pictures if you have nowhere to put them? If they just sit in a box you’re wasting the space and the great pictures you’ve taken. If you’re juts a beginner when it comes to scrapbooking there are some scrapbooking basics to know in order to help you get started on your own scrapbooking adventure. This article, Basic scrapbooking techniques, what to know will give you some basic pointers on making a great scrapbook.
Let’s first take a closer look at what exactly a scrapbook is. It’s difficult to define the word scrapbook as there are many different kinds of scrapbooks and scrapbookers out there. So let’s not define what it is, but what a scrapbook does. A scrapbook is more than just pictures or pieces of hair when you were a baby. A scrapbook tells a story; the story of someone’s life. This is truly the heart of scrapbooking. It is a personal story for every different scrapbooker of their life, a child’s life, or someone in their life that they have cared about. It is a celebration of life captured in moments and put onto paper. It is a ways to preserve memories of yesterday for those that may read it tomorrow.
Scrapbooking Basics, what to know
1.Find a starting point
The best place to start with a scrapbook is to use meaningful events that have happened in your life or in the life of the person you are scrapbooking. For example, if it is your life then try and think about the times in your life that have been the most important and meaningful for you. Maybe the day you got married, graduation, specific family vacations, your first baby, or a special reward you earned. These can all be great things to scrapbook but sometimes the hardest so it will take some planning and organization.
2.Organize your pictures
Now that you have decided on what events you want to scrapbook you will need to find the pictures you want. If the event hasn’t taken place yet (like an upcoming vacation or your wedding day) then you will have to decide carefully what you want to take pictures of. For the sake of this article however let’s say that we have the pictures taken. The best way to organize pictures is to put them in chronological order so that when you look at the pages it makes sense to you and to whoever else looks at it. Organizing your pictures will definitely take some time but will make the rest of your scrapbooking adventure much easier.
3.Scrapbook design and layout
The next thing to consider when scrapbooking is your design and layout. Before you actually stick your pictures to the page you will want to place them on the page to see where they fit the best. When we talk about design it includes how many photos to place on the page, where to place them, and what types of papers and embellishments you want to use. This is perhaps the most intricate and detailed portion of scrapbooking and will take a majority of time in planning and consideration. It’s better to lay everything out however before you glue it down in case you change your mind about something.
4.Journaling
Once you have your pictures picked out, and your design for the page figured out and have everything on your page, you can then decide what you want to journal. Not every page needs to have journaling on it, but it is nice to have something that describes the pictures on the page; whether it’s just a title, a small poem, or a story that makes it unique to you. You can write something you remember specifically about the day you took the picture, or something you remember about the people in the picture, or just the picture date. Depending on your own personal style you can write a few sentences or a whole paragraph.
These are just a few of the scrapbook basics that will help you get started in making your own memories come alive and help you get started in making your own scrapbook.