ScrapBooking Tips 4U

The children nowadays can have their birthday parties themed around anything they especially enjoy and the adults can join in as well.I am referring to a particular type of party which used to be solely known as Tupperware Parties, the type where adults get together with coffee and cake to order something from a catalogue of items which the host-friend then collects the orders and has them delivered at a later date. That was the ‘olden times,’ nowadays it is possible to be invited to “Candle Parties,” “Chocolate Parties” and now possibly the newest version, “Scrapbooking Parties.” This is a chance to buy things,do a training session and swop ideas as well as appreciate other people’s albums.

As the nights begin to draw in, it may seem that we have more time for our hobbies.Sitting in the warm and cosy lounge with family members around and being able to chat about the day’s events while arranging things on the scrapbook pages. But we need to be careful as sometimes attention to details on the page in front of you is taken away and mistakes can be easily made with placings of items that then take a while to sort out.I suffered from this problem quite a few times,until I found a Spraymount fixative which allows me to stick something to the page but then change my mind about whereabouts I want to place it,and then even change my mind again,so now I use it all the time.Look out for it in your local stationers,and if they don’t have it ask the manager to stock it as you won’t be the only crafter to benefit from its appearance on the shelves.

There are many forms of celebration of the season’s harvest around the world and many different cultures celebrate different fruits,vegetables and other goods.One of the nicest though that I think of is when the children find something new that the trees have deposited for them.I am thinking specifically about the Horse chestnut tree and it’s fruit which are blown down in the Autumn months, and fall breaking open their shells to reveal the shiny,brown conker hiding within. The children delight in collecting bags and bags full of the fruits of this tree.Some of the conkers a few years back would have been used to play conker fights against each other, but that is now actively discouraged and in some areas totally banned.Other children have planted the conkers and grown many mini-trees only to struggle to find big enough spaces for them later on. But the celebration of the conker and the joy that is evident on the childrens faces makes more wonderful scrapbook pages and pictures for them which will be a talking point in years to come. It is well worth finding the right tree to visit on one of the family walks with camera to get some of those shots.

When friends tell you that they are moving away,however far away they will be it will be a very stressful time,as neighbors we can help by doing various small things, such as on moving day offering to look after the children, and baking some food for them to take with them, or inviting them back to our own home for a meal. One of the other things which we have done for our neighbors when they have moved away, is to produce a mini-scrapbook with various pictures of the neighborhood, and their friends which we have collected over a period of time. I know that they have looked through these many times with a lot of chatter as the memories came back.So, if your neighbors are moving,then start planning and collecting the pictures,it takes a lotof time but it is well worth the effort.

It’s all very well and nice to see the photographs of your children having fun at Auntie Sarah’s 30th Birthday Party, but in just a few years time you may struggle to be able to name the people on the photo even if you manage to get the actual occasion right! So to solve this problem, and disguise the normal state of amnesia associated with the passage of time, make sure that each scrapbook page which has pictures on it also has some labels(or journalling) to help identify not only the occasion, but also the happy people attending.It is so easy to do and makes your life so much better, when proudly showing the years pages at Christmas time to other relatives who are visiting you. The labels need not be totally boring, as they can be bordered by some fancy or contrasting ribbon, in order to help the co-ordinated look of the page.

Mnay craft shops nowadays not only have a big seasonal sale, when they are due to change a lot of stock from one big celebration or season to another and don’t really want to store the left-overs for the next year, but they also have a specific sales table. Be very aware of the placement of this as there could be many things which will be useful to help build your stash of scrapbooking things,but also  make sure that what you are intending to buy from the table really will be useful to you,and that you can immediately think of at least two projects when the items will be used,rather than them just sitting in the cupboard or drawer filling up space and gathering dust. If you have a scrapbooking friend who is also planning a project like yours and something suitable is on the sales table you may even find that you are able to sell on some to them and not only re-coup some of your money but help your friend as well.

Some of the shops that offer sales catalogs also have some scrapbooking kits in them.Now, although with a lot of these sort of kits you may find that what you get in them is not a lot for the amount of money that you had to pay I would like to suggest that as a basis for a store or stash of scrapbooking pages and other embellishments then these sort of kits are a good thing to buy. A lot of groups nowadays offer their members a swopping time where members can exchange pages or other items that they have no more use for,a modern way of recycling.So, it is possible if you buy a kit that has an awful set of pages in that you would be able to swop with someone else who could have been looking for just that particular shade of paper.

When we have wanted to put a series of photographs onto the scrapbook page to support a particular theme, we have framed them by using some separate contrasting paper and some glue spots.The photographs look so much better and seem to stand out more. We had tried other ways of attaching the photographs to the pages such as photo-corners but nothing seemed to be that successful until we used the glue-spots and then we were able to improve our pages.For some things we then went back and redid them as they looked better,and tried other things such as broad ribbon and florist’s ribbon.Both of these seemed to work quite well in so far as we didn’t use them on small pictures but rather the bigger portraits.

This is such a painful subject for many children-mine included, and yet when it all goes right, then things can seem really fantastic.I have taken some photographs without my children realising, as they have carried on, through what seems to them a horrendous mountain of questions and exercise books. Much later I have been able to use them with some catalog pictures of school desks and books, to illustrate a particular school year or project which they were working on at the time. The older ones have then later looked at these pages in their scrapbooks with some slight amusement, and been able to retell various stories from in class when they gave the work in or it was handed back having been marked by the teacher. At least they have been able to understand the significance of the subject matter at a later stage, and of course they were able to mark my work out of ten, and then I left a space for their own teacher type comment to written onto the page.So sometimes it may be wiser not to use your photographs on your scrapbook pages immediately they have been printed, but store them away for when the children will not be so embaressed by their use.

This is really difficult to portray in our family scrapbook but with a few varieties of pictures and techniques we have had a go. At the beginning of the evening we make sure that we have some pictures of our guests taken while the outside,natural light is still fairly good.We then have tried doing fingerprints of our guests,individual but not totally successful, and not an idea that I would actually recommend having tried it. But we did have a session of making some crafts which was fun and we also had as one of our guests a friend who was very talented in pencil drawings of people.He had struggled for a while so in a way when he was doing drawings of the fellow guests at the party for him it was therapeutic,and certainly those who knew him well could see the benefits of his artwork on his confidence levels. The scrapbook pages benefitted as well, with some very beautiful drawings done by a talented local artist.