Get Started in Scrapbooking
It seems like fun – everyone is doing it – and have you seen those great little doohickeys they have in the stores? These are all great reasons to get started in scrapbooking, so if you’re feeling overwhelmed by it or don’t know how to start, read on.
Start Simple
It’s really important to start archiving all of the family history, arranging all of the family pictures, or just to keep up with the rest of the family scrapbookers, but you don’t have to do it all in your first scrapbooking project.
Begin with a simple project and choose a theme: a certain vacation, a single holiday, a child’s school career, a wedding.
Don’t use all the photos you have, choose a few photos that tell the story you want to tell. Leave the rest of the photos in the shoebox for future projects.
Let go of the pressures by not setting a deadline. Don’t make the story strictly chronological, limit your color theme, set out to design each page differently, or set any unnecessary goals. Just relax and get started.
What You Will Need
Start scrapbooking with the bare necessities or with all the bells and whistles according to your personal style. First, you need an album, so pick one that will go with the idea that you have or let the store supply inspire you. While you’re in the store, pick up some refill pages to fit your album. You don’t want to run out in the middle of your scrapbooking project and discover that these exact pages are difficult to find. Get a good pair of scissors just for scrapbooking, and make sure they are comfortable in your hand and sharp, then keep them with your supplies.
You’ll need adhesive. Find one in the scrapbooking aisle of the craft store. Make sure it’s acid-free and is good for both photos and cardstock, because you will want to choose cardstock and paper to accent your photos. Choose holiday colors for holiday scrapbooking and baby pastels for baby scrapbooking. And lastly, you will need a craft store that specializes in scrapbooking so you can find specialized papers that are available by the sheet.
Stories need words. Select fine-tipped, permanent acid-free pens to supply the words, though, hand-printed titles may require wider tips. This shopping list will get you started, and the scrapbooking supplies in your craft store will show you many more items.
Step One
Find the photos that fit your chosen topic, and choose the two or three colors of paper that will enhance your photos. Select the photo that will be the page’s focus, then crop and mat the photos according to your taste. Add the titling and journaling and all the bells and whistles, like stickers and doodads. Then just arrange all the elements of the page before you start sticking anything on.
Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Good luck and good scrapbooking!
