Take a look at your old Thanksgiving layouts. Do you recognize a pattern? Most scrappers include page designs that feature the Turkey Day spread, family members gorging on the spread, and a few candid shots of the guys watching football or the kids playing outside in the leaves.
However, one of the benefits of scrapbooking is being able to tailor your pages to reflect personal memories. So if you spend Thanksgiving deer hunting instead of roasting a turkey and mashing potatoes, then your layouts should illustrate this.
Buck the trend of sticking to traditional Thanksgiving layouts if your family adheres to different customs. For example, if you skip the turkey all together and instead head out to a Chinese restaurant to celebrate Turkey Day, then embrace that tradition. Create a layout with photos from your unconventional Thanksgiving meal and embellish it with stickers and clip art of fortune cookies and chopsticks.
There are hundreds of budget-friendly embellishments you can use to make untraditional Thanksgiving layouts, including using scrap pieces of cardstock in fall colors. A few years ago I passed out small scraps of leftover cardstock to each guest who dined with us on Thanksgiving and had them jot down one thing he or she was thankful for. I then used the pieces of cardstock to create a border around photos of the gang chowing down around the Thanksgiving dinner table.
Another simple way to embellish traditional or untraditional Thanksgiving layouts is to use ink or acrylic paint to decorate leaves. In addition, instead of purchasing expensive scrapbook paper in autumnal prints, consider decorating a paper bag with fall-themed stamps and stickers and using your masterpiece as a photo mat on your layout. Finally, if you are a die hard cook, then scan copies of your most cherished handwritten Thanksgiving recipes to include in your scrapbook layout. Doing so will help preserve the memorabilia in a special way for future generations to appreciate.
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