Despite taking five years of piano and three years of flute lessons as a child, I can’t play myself out of a paper bag. Well, that’s not entirely true. I can still play “Turkey in the Straw” and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on the piano from memory without messing up… too much. And I can blow out a decent rendition of the theme song from “Dallas” on the flute like an aging rock star.
Do rock stars play the flute?
In any event, memories of my days as a lackluster music student came flooding back recently when I was asked to help design a scrapbook for my friend’s tweenage saxophone-playing son, Adam.
Now there’s a kid with talent.
Adam just returned from band camp and has plenty of photos to prove how much fun he had with his fellow musical prodigies.
Music-themed scrapbooking supplies are readily available in craft stores and online. However, I wanted my friend’s son’s scrapbook to have some unique elements to enhance the many photos and mementos he brought back from camp, so I decided to make customized background paper. This is a technique I’ve covered in the past. It’s simple and affordable, provided you have a computer and printer at home.
For one of the pages I employed digital photo editing software to print the lyrics from one of Adam’s favorite songs. On another page I featured the following famous music-themed quotes over and over to create an entire background of inspiring phrases:
“Music’s the medicine of the mind.”–John A. Logan
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”–Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”–Bob Marley
“Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul”–Plato
“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”–Victor Hugo
“Music is what feelings sound like.”–Author Unknown
“When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have.”–Edgar Watson Howe
Once you select lyrics or famous quotes you can use free fonts to really jazz up the page. One tip: Save the larger fonts that mimic ones used to create famous band logos for page titles; they are much too big for photo captions, multiple background embellishments and journaling blocks.