I just spent an hour going through the Christmas photos I snapped earlier this morning. My goal was to select about a dozen or so to email to my mom in Hawaii, as she is trying to finish a year in review scrapbook and needs shots of the grandkids opening their presents.
The rest of the photos will be featured in my holiday-themed layouts, which will be dramatically less elaborate than my mother’s page designs. Unlike my mom, I didn’t go wild buying a ton of new Christmas embellishments this year. Whereas I plan to look for scrapbook supply deals at post-Christmas sales, I’ve been concentrating on taking advantage of free or very cheap decorations as much as possible to preserve my budget.
So far I’ve got six pages worth of free holiday-themed fonts at Font Space’s website. In addition, I put my 7-year-old to work cutting out paper snowflakes. However, instead of letting her chop up plain white paper, I gave her silver and frosty blue origami paper to work with. You could also use colored construction paper to make the snowflakes bigger and add a small photo in the middle.
If you have a paper punch, you can save a ton of money by making your own snowmen from white cardstock. Simply punch out circles in a variety of sizes, glue them together to form the snowmen, and then decorate them with buttons, markers and ribbon. Otherwise, scrap the paper idea and simply use cotton balls to create fluffy-looking snowmen. Then, finish off the page by using chalk or colored pencils to create a border.
A simple way to save on paper is to use leftover Christmas wrapping or download some free holiday-themed clip art and place the images over a solid background for festive look. If you are on a really tight budget, download free digital scrapbooking supplies. Most of the files can be used with Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. If you don’t have image editing software, just print the clip art onto cardstock and use it in traditional scrapbooks.
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