Scrapbooking: a great way to preserve memories

I think it’s a shame these days that people don’t get their photos printed out. But it’s so easy to take photos these days with mobile phones and digital cameras that I would spend a fortune printing out all the photos that I take. I used to do that, until a few years ago, and have dozens of photo albums containing hundreds if not thousands of photos. But I find it hard to narrow down holiday snaps to just 24 or 36 – like when you used to only have that many exposures on a roll of film – and it gets expensive if you print out 100 photos at a time. Having said that, I have done that, using Snapfish – a photo printing website where you can upload your photos and print them out from as little as 7p each.

 

Not long after I met my boyfriend I started scrapbooking, as a fun way of crafting and preserving memories. I made one for him with a few pages, including our first Christmas and first holiday together, and planned to add some pages every year. The last couple of years I don’t seem to have been able to find the time so I was long overdue – since I last added to our scrapbook we’ve moved in together, bought a house, and gone on several holidays to Lapland, America, Vienna and Mexico.

 

Snapfish gave me a voucher code to spend on their site and do some crafting with whatever I bought. The main project I tackled was covering some cardboard letters spelling the word ‘love’ with a collage of mini photos.

 

I also decided to get some more photos printed out to use in our scrapbook. I got some standard-sized 6x4 photos (from 7p each) and some 10x8 collage photos (£1.09), which allow you to take up to 20 images and shuffle them around in different combinations, so some print out different sizes than others. These are then great to cut up allowing you to arrange them wherever you want in the scrapbook.

 

I keep various little souvenirs – ticket stubs, paper napkins from restaurants and so on – and I have a huge stash of crafting supplies as I make a lot of cards. I often look online for specific embellishments I want for a particular project.

 

So how do you get started with scrapbooking? First get a scrapbook – it can be any size but for this project I prefer to use 12x12 inches. I have made much smaller scrapbooks before for friends where I only had room for one 6x4 photo and some embellishments on each page. I’ve also seen some nice 8x8 scrapbooks with thick black cardboard pages. My 12x12 scrapbook actually has clear plastic pockets rather than pages, which gives you even more freedom.

 

You can buy loose pages from craft shops (eg online or my local high street has a card making supplies shop), Hobbycraft, Ebay and so on. Sometimes they come in packs, which is usually cheaper, but you can also buy individual sheets of card or thick paper which means you can choose exactly the colour and pattern you want for your project.

 

Decide on the theme or subject of your page. What story are you telling? This will also help you decide your layout – for instance if there is going to be one main image or several. It could be celebrating the birth of a new baby; a child’s birthday; a holiday; or a season, like a selection of autumnal pictures (children playing in the leaves and so on).

 

Once you’ve chosen your photo(s), the next step is the embellishment. You can add what is known as journaling – i.e. words – either by using some letter stickers to spell out a word or name, or writing some lines on a piece of card or paper and adding this to the page. Or how about using your computer to print out captions to go under the photos?

 

Photos look nice when matted onto a piece of card and then mounted on the page; you can also give your page a title, a border – anything you like. Think about layouts – do you want pictures in a particular order to tell a story? A main image with smaller ones underneath, or overlapping the corners, or create a pocket out of card that you can tuck ticket stubs and mementos into? Have a look at Pinterest for some inspiration.

For this page I decided to record some memories of a recent holiday to Mexico. I bought a packet of stickers in a gift shop at Uxmal, one of the archaeological sites we visited, that had a lot of the different places we've been to.

First to choose the cardboard for the page itself; I wanted something with a bit of  a Mexican feel but that didn't have too dominant a pattern. I decided to go for a plain red page, but mount a square of card on top that had red flowers on it.

I used Snapfish's collage printing service and cut up a photo collage I'd had made of some of our holiday photos from snapfish and decided to mount them on card. I arranged some down the side of the page, and some on the patterned piece of card, at slight angles.

 

I decided the stickers looked best across the bottom of the page; I only used three but they were some of the most impressive places we visited and the three stickers I chose were roughly the same size and shape as well - I liked the uniformity.

I had a packet of Jolee's Mexico stickers I'd bought from Ebay a while ago in anticipation of this project which contained the word Mexico in big letters, which I stuck across the top of the page. It had some other stickers which I had fun with  - when my boyfriend saw the page he commented "You've got me in a silly hat and a lizard playing maracas!". Sadly only one of those things actually happened on holiday.

There were some red chilli pepper stickers I put along the bottom and also a margarita cocktail sticker I added to a little photo of our amazing hotel balcony where I enjoyed a few drinks in the sunshine. Finally a tall thin cactus sticker filled a space I had been wondering what to do with and added the final touch!

Thanks to Snapfish for the voucher for their website

More 30th birthday albums

As soon as I gave Alice her birthday album, all my friends started clamouring for one. One asked me outright if I would do one for her birthday too, and I had to admit that I had already started working on it!

I really enjoyed making them - choosing the photographs and picking out embellishments, and remembering all the good times we had had. Each album did take several hours and probably cost a fair bit, given how many stickers, embellishments and other bits and pieces I bought for each one, but it was well worth it.

As you can see with these, I made the covers look similar, but used different colour schemes. I also tied a piece of ribbon through the spiral binding.

With the page below, a picture of me with one of my friends at another friend's wedding, I wanted the picture to be the main focus. We are wearing green dresses so I went for a pale green background, with some outline stickers in the corner (for a more classic rather than colourful modern effect) and a transparent sticker with the words "lifelong friends" across the top. I'm on the right in the photo by the way, I can't believe how young I look - but it was about 8 years ago!

This picture was taken while we enjoyed a jacuzzi in a hotel swimming pool. I remember the photo was taken by the waiter who brought us our drinks - we weren't supposed to have drinks near the pool, I wonder how we managed to persuade him?!

I used some leftover lettering stickers from a recent birthday card (see the previous "Cards for men" post) to spell out "water babies" and added a couple of sticky metallic blue flowers. The page also has a blue background, in keeping with the water theme - all of it was thought through!

Can you recognise me in the photo? He he....

This picture was from my friend's wedding. I used some dome stickers with love and wedding wording and a foam heart, along with what I considered a romantic colourscheme for the background. Sorry the photo is sideways!

Incidentally every album had a lot more photos than this - I think there were about 20 pages - but I am only including a few of them here. See the previous post for more information on how and why they were made.

In the example below, I used two photos from a party where my friend was doing some very impressive karaoke. I went for a jazzy-colured background, a 3D "star" sticker and some musical notes.

This page was to remind my friends of a really fun girls' holiday we had in Croatia. The background paper is the colour of sunset (roughly when this photo was taken, as we were going out for the evening) and as well as the sun sticker, I stuck on a little cocktail umbrella, the kind you get in drinks. Of which I think we had plenty!

This is from the same holiday and as the pages were adjacent in the scrapbook, I used the same background paper. The two main embellishments are really cool - they are sticky, but designed to look like bottle tops, and were actually made of metal. They were printed with different holiday messages or pictures and I think came in a pack of six.

This picture is from one of the girl's hen nights, where some people had a surfing lesson. I bought a packet of Jolie's stickers on a surfing theme and, unsurprisingly, used a blue background with a swirly pattern (which you can't quite make out in this photo) to represent waves and the sea.

And here is the lovely hen getting married! I kept this page quite simple, and used a purple background to reflect the colours of some of the guests' dresses. I added a big "love" 3d sticker and a "friends forever" sticky ribbon across the button.

I am on the left in this photo, laughing because the heel of my shoe got stuck in the grass!

30th birthday scrapbooks

For my best friends'30th birthdays I wanted to give them something special. After getting into card making and buying Creativity magazine, I realised that scrapbooking could be a fun extension of my hobby and a good way to create a more personal present. I decided to put together a little album of photos and memories from the almost two decades we had known each other. My friends have kindly given me permission to put these photos on my blog.

I bought a blank cardboard ringbound album from Ebay, which I think was 10x8 inches - plenty big enough for a photo plus some embellishments per page. I really liked the front cover, below. I covered the cardboard cover with purple paper, used cardboard letters to spell out my friend's name and added two types of butterfly embellishments- die-cuts and rather fancier 3D ones. I also put two pieces of sticky ribbon along the bottom.


Inside the album I included a selection of photos going right back to our school days. I'm not going to put them all up here, but here are a few examples. In this one below, I used a selection of girl friend-related transfer words but allowed the photo to be the focus of the page.

Not every page contained a photo. Here I made a pocket by cutting a piece of card diagonally so it would take up half the scrapbook page and stuck it along the bottom two edges to make a pocket. I covered both the page underneath and the pocket with the same patterned paper. I edged the pocket with sticky ribbon and made a gift tag to slip inside. It says "I like bees" as my friend had just taken up bee-keeping and at the time, her entire "about me" section on Facebook said "I like bees"!

I was very excited to be able to include a picture of my friend's baby in the album. For this page I chose a pink patterned background, stuck on a selection of buttons that I bought on Ebay, and used my X-Cut die-cutting machine (which was quite expensive - about £40 - but came with a bunch of stencils including alphabet letters, which I have used quite a lot) to make the words "cute as a button". She really is!

This is the back cover of the album, covered in the same paper as the front with lots of die-cut butterflies in different pastel shades. I also have several sheets of "handmade by Caroline" stickers that I ordered via Ebay. I think my friend was really pleased with her gift!