Category Archives: Scrapbooking

Reviews of favorite scrapbooking products and tips on creating simple yet beautiful scrapbooks, cards and other paper crafts.

Experiment with Different Shapes

If you have been waiting for a big sale on holiday-themed scrapbooking supplies, Michaels has just granted your Christmas wish.  The mega-craft store is offering a slew of savings, plus major money-saving coupons which can be used to purchase seasonally inspired scrapbooking items, from albums to paper and just about everything in between. Once you get your holiday haul home, consider experimenting with new designs as you piece together your layouts.  For example, while you could easily pick-up a bunch of scrapbooking photo frames, stickers, stamps and die-cuts in fun holiday shapes, it doesn’t take that much effort to make … Continue reading →

Making the Most of Leftovers

Tis the season to go through your scrapbooking stash. The holidays are a great time to assess the type and amount of scrapbook materials you have in stock.  The items that you want can be added to your Christmas wish list, while the leftovers can be used to craft end-of-the-year memory books. Taking inventory of your scrapbooking paper, embellishments and albums may sound like a pain, but in the long run it can prove to be a very cost-effective exercise.  In addition, finding ways to repurpose existing materials is a wonderful way to flex your creative muscle. Here are some … Continue reading →

Subtle Holiday Touches

When it comes to crafting holiday scrapbooks, it’s not necessary to make every page as electrifying as the Griswold’s home in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”  Rather, there are plenty of ways to celebrate the season with more subtle touches.  For example, instead of going to extremes covering your pages with bright colors, large graphics and other extreme elements, consider softer embellishments that don’t overpower your photos or mementos.  After all, if you want the focus of the layout to be your family’s treasured pictures, then attaching tons of extraneous bells and whistles will only interfere with this goal.  Conversely, featuring … Continue reading →

Make Merry Layouts

Tis the season for your mailbox to overflow with holiday merriment.  In a few weeks, it will be overflowing with bills accrued from making merry, so now’s the time to make the most of those seasonal greetings. As you are going through the cards, photos and newsletters sent by family and friends, take a moment to note which ones you would like to preserve.  Pretty holiday greetings make fabulous additions to Christmas-themed scrapbooks.  Not only do they provide gorgeous images to enhance layouts, holiday cards also allow you to save special handwritten messages from loved ones. Christmas is a magical … Continue reading →

Seasonal Titles

It’s time to haul out the holly and deck those halls. The holidays are a hectic time whether you are traveling thousands of miles to grandma’s house or you’re hosting Christmas at your own home.  In the midst of the madness, scrapbooking often gets put on the back burner.  However, if you are planning to craft a memory album to preserve your family’s precious holiday moments, it’s important to keep documenting despite the hoopla. Have your camera handy so you can snap your family members and friends making merry.  Remember to take some candid shots along with the posed images … Continue reading →

Capture the Holiday Magic

It took nearly six years for me to capture a photo of my daughter with Santa. I can’t remember a time when my daughter wasn’t deathly afraid of the holly, jolly, chubby guy.  She’s not a fan of skinny men with facial hair either, but I digress. My daughter’s exceptional fear of Mr. Claus made it impossible for me to snap a picture of the two of them together, so when it finally happened, I crafted a double page scrapbook layout commemorating the event. Two pages for a single trip to see a mall Santa may seem like overkill to … Continue reading →

Over 40 Holiday-Themed Scrapbook Title Ideas

  “Holiday Hoopla” is the title of a scrapbook layout I made last year.  It features photos of three generations of my family cooking together.  I was going to use “Organized Chaos,” but decided to go with the seasonal title instead. Coming up with page titles is a passion for some scrapbookers, while others see it as a pain.  I like to ponder page titles while I am figuring out the placement of my photos, memorabilia and embellishments.  Often, a title will pop into my head as I survey all of the materials I am featuring on the layout.  However, … Continue reading →

Holiday Time Crunch

Do you wait until January to craft holiday-themed layouts? I used to stock up on festive Christmas-themed embellishments, papers and memorabilia throughout the month of December, and then go into hiding during the first week of January to complete a marathon scrapbooking session.  However, my pages never turned out as well as I would have liked given my time crunch.  I felt pressure to slap together holiday memory albums just so I could cross it off my to-do list.  What’s more, I was extremely bothered by the idea of working on Christmas scrapbooks when Valentine’s Day was just around the … Continue reading →

Experimenting with New Designs

Many avid scrapbook fans also dabble in book-binding.  Newbies may be intimidated by the prospect of making their own scrapbook covers, but once you start experimenting with new techniques, the idea of designing a memory album from cover to cover is not as challenging as you may think. There are many advantages to crafting your own covers.  For starters, you get full reign over creative control.  You can design a cover of any shape or size.  In addition, you can use a variety of your favorite materials to embellish your cover.  For example, one of the first covers I attempted … Continue reading →

Preparing for Crops

  Weekend scrapbooking crops are the perfect venue to learn new techniques, get inspiration from fellow scrappers and experiment with new tools.  The organized get-togethers are exciting and informative, but they can also be intimidating for newbies. Depending on how large of a crop you attend, you could be looking at scrapbooking with hundreds of other memory book builders.  In order to keep the event running smoothly, there are typically quite a few rules to consider.  When I attended my first crop the following ditty circulated around the ballroom.  It was discovered on Scrapbook.com and speaks to the unwritten rules … Continue reading →