Looking forward to some fun summer photos to scrapbook?
Here are lots of ideas for summer and vacation pages, mini-books, albums, shooting photos and choosing photos, and even ideas for packing so you can scrapbook while on your vacation…
Continue reading Thirty Plus Ideas for Scrapbooking Summer and Summer Vacations
Ever feel like people don’t spend as much time gazing at your scrapbook layouts as your pages deserve?
What is it about some pages that cause people to stop and really look?
Well, it can be a number of different things, but one of the big characteristics that draw people in are layers.
When you have layers, you have some things hidden, only partially peeking out.
And that causes mystery.
People love a mystery. Just look at the popularity of the TV show, Lost. It was one mystery after another that kept the audience coming back, episode after episode and season after season.
The more layers you have on your scrapbook layouts, the more time someone needs to spend trying to “solve” all those layers. And the longer you can keep them at it, the more they’re interacting with it and making an emotional connection.
So if you want to engage people longer and get them to connect with your scrapbook layout and your story, try creating some layers.
Want a little guidance or inspiration?
In this week’s episode of Paperclipping I share a new Flexible Template: Layered Diagonals. It’s a template for creating layers on your pages. If you’re experienced with layers, this might give you a new way to make them. If you’re new to it, it’ll give you some direction to give you confidence and get you going!
You’ll see me put together two pages — both full of layers. You’ll learn more about the design principles that go into them, too.
This scrapbooking video tutorial is available for members in the Member’s Area and on iTunes.
Shine On,
These are the albums I’m most actively adding layouts to all the time right now.
I scrapbook whatever I feel like at the moment, and then I slip the page into the album I want it to go into.
Here are topics of the active albums (shown above):
One of these is actually complete. The rest are all in-progress. Since I add to these slightly less often than the others, they’re out in the living room cabinet.
I love having these different topics I can add to. I love the focus of topic when I look through the scrapbooks, and stories that develop within them, too!
Another benefit of having themes is that it’s easy to tell what parts of the story I’m missing.
* * Remember * * With the method that I shared in video episodes 175-176, you don’t have to plan these out ahead of time. It’s about being spontaneous with the scrapbook layouts you feel like doing, and then pulling it together with a few easy steps at the end!
If you’re just landing here and haven’t seen my other posts on scrapbook albums, including an article and videos on the awesomeness of transforming your albums into complete unified, complete stories, please click here.
The video series is only available to our Paperclipping Members. If you’re not a member, you may not realize it’s like taking dozens and dozens of classes for the price of just one!
You’ll get 176 video tutorials when you sign up, plus two more every month. Click here for more info.
Have you scrapbooked much about the most important relationship in your life? Here are ten ideas to get you going…
Note it. Appreciate it. Write it down.
The Things I Hear You Say
The things I hear you say to the kids on my behalf…
“Guys, get away from Mom’s door. I don’t want her to feel rushed.”
…while I was finishing a scrapbook project before leaving with the family.
The Things You Say to Me
Me: Do you need me?
You: I always need you. You’re a need and a want.
XOXO
Me: Sorry to bother you again.
You: Oh, don’t worry about bothering me. It just means I get to see you again.
Inside Jokes
Funny Stories and Incidents
I’m still working on the actual scrapbooking of this part, but I’ve been dong a lot of the photo-capturing and journaling!
A Favorite Venue
We come here about every other week. I have lots of pictures here!
A Favorite Activity
We love live music and going to concerts. Here we are outside Dodge Theater waiting to see Slightly Stoopid play.
You don’t have to share the particulars. I didn’t…
Somehow we’ll make it cause that’s what we do. –Red Hot Chili Peppers
Your Personalities
I think vacation scrapbook stories are even more interesting and meaningful if you focus more on how your personalities come into play in the vacation.
Or how the vacation might affect the relationship.
New Starts and Joint Discoveries
This hike inspired the idea of mountain-biking through the desert trails. We’ve been biking most every Friday since this trip except during the most extreme points of winter and summer.
We ate at our first vegan restaurant — Loving Spoonfuls! We loved it!
This trip was the start of a whole series of firsts and a fun new exciting time in our life together.
Money talks. But it don’t sing and dance and it don’t walk. Long as I can have you here with me I’d much rather be forever in blue jeans. (Neil Diamond).
In October you walked away from The Man. The suit and the tie disappeared and the jeans came out. We depend now on our creativity and drive. We gave up a lot of monetary luxuries. And we are happier. Life is more fun than ever before. The past three months have been a honeymoon for us. Life is so very, very good. Love you.
Hopefully this gave you a few bits of inspiration to start some new pages.
Want more ideas for scrapbooking about love and relationships? Check out these other posts…
Four Scrapbook Layout Ideas on Love
A Romantic Mini-book Idea
I’m excited to share another Flexible Template in this episode — these are some of the audience favorites! Not only will you get a flexible scrapbooking idea that you can use for different amounts of photos, but I also share some design principles so you can choose how to vary your design according to what you want to communicate.
This is a good template for multiple photo pages. Also, this template works great whether you want to do a single page or a two page scrapbook layout, which you will see in the three layout examples below — two doubles and one single.
The video tutorial is for Paperclipping Members, but we have a trailer of the video if you’re not a member, and we have example scrapbook layouts below.
You can also right-click to save the video.
If you are not a Paperclipping Member, you can watch the trailer or download it to your computer. For this and other scrapbooking ideas, please click here to find out more.
2-page 12×12 layout
Journaling reads: Your gifts from Santa – the big items on your wish lists this year (plus umbrellas — my wish).
2-page 12×12 layout
Journaling reads:
Who else but a bunch of scrapbookers could meeting person for the first time after communicating only briefly through email and click so immediately?
Dedra and I met Lain Ehmann after she taught classes at a CK Convention. We had dinner on Main Street in downtown Mesa. And of course, we all had our cameras. So we reverted to a junior high age-mentality and shot a bunch of photos of oursevles around the city sculptures.
So much fun!
Supplies for this page: I did a fun technique on this black Bazzill glazed cardstock to lighten the negative space around the images and give it some glimmer. Members can watch this technique by locating Paperclipping 146 in the Members Area. You’ll need Banana Pudding Chalkboard Glimmer Mist.
i can’t find any avaialble floral gaffer tape by 7 Gypsies, but the great blingy items at the end of the tape are Prima flower centers from the Sultan collection.
Note: All linked items are a part of my affiliate store. I purchase all of my scrapbooking supplies myself at retail price (nothing is given to me), just like you! If you make a purchase through my links, I will receive a small commission. Thank you!
12×12 layout
Journaling reads: We tease. We play. We dance. We joke. We love.
Note – I realize I forget to mention where we were and why on this page! I’ll be adding it to the top left in the empty space!
Supplies for this page: The only supplies on this page that are still available are the metal ones — but they’re some of my favorites! The Muse Tokens have great depth and texture that doesn’t show up in the images online. And then there are the Spinners, which I altered Paperclipping 152. Members can watch the tutorial in the Members Area.
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I hope you like today’s episode! It’s always nice to get a little design help for multiple photo layouts, which tend to be the hardest to pull off.
To learn about a Paperclipping Membership so you can have access to our archive of scrapbooking ideas (almost 160 tutorials!), plus receive two more episodes a month, please click here!
Ever since I went through my old-school scrapbooks from high school and college a year or two ago, I’ve been on an escalating (though quiet) rampage regarding Life-Stuff — in other words, memorabilia and ephemera. I realized I enjoy my old scrapbooks — void of cute papers and embellishments, but packed full of stuff from my life — as much as my current ones, which were heavier on the “cute,” but lighter on the “life.”
Some memorabilia can tell the parts of the stories that our words and photos leave out. Skeptical? You’ll see some examples below.
In addition to the obvious ticket stubs, play bills, and post cards, there are other types of memorabilia/ephemera you might not have considered. Here are five qualities that compel me to save some memorabilia while tossing the others:
While the left pocket in the memorabilia protector below holds the common concert memorabilia, the pocket on the right is holding ephemera from my favorite clothing store. Those items say a little something about me right now. Eventually these pieces will move onto a layout or mini-book.
Some items tell a more subtle story about things that are going on in your life. At the end of the school year, Aiden’s teacher sent home a bunch of his first grade schoolwork. As I fished through the pieces, deciding what to toss and what to keep, I found the page below in a Valentines book where Aiden drew a picture of himself handing his great grandmother a heart.
At first I thought it was strange that he depicted Grandma Holt in bed, until I put the clues together and remembered that the month before he drew it, we had been visiting her in hospice. She died a couple weeks before Valentine’s Day. This drawing means that our visits, and Aiden’s relationship with Grandma, had enough of an impact on him to include it in his Valentine’s story two weeks later.
The handwriting alone doesn’t do it for me, since we’re talking about collecting current ephemera, and there are a lot of possible pieces to save based on the handwriting criteria alone. But coupled with something else on the list, it’s very cool. Below is a story in Blake’s handwriting. He is a natural writer and I noticed that he used story-writing as a way to deal with a frustrating scenario involving a sibling.
Actually, I’ve noticed he’s not the only one in my family to deal with situations this way. I may (or may not) want to combine these stories about various family members into one scrapbook story about family tendencies.
Aiden is also a writer — actually all five of us are — and after he wrote the “book” below, he pointed out to me that he included a problem and a solution in his plot-line, something he had recently learned.
Trinity draws almost every day, and most of what she draws has bright colors, hearts, and rainbows. I want to share her common art subject in a future scrapbook page, and I decided to save one that also included characters from her favorite movie, Hairspray.
Below is something I saved that my Dad wrote to me, way back in 1980.
When I was around fourteen, I decided to save this playful piece of paper my sister and I occupied our minds with during church. I could just journal something like, “My sister and I loved to play and tease, even during church,” but that doesn’t say it the way this does . . .
And this is something I found in a paper pad. It’s the score sheet kept by one of my kids’ favorite babysitters from a game she played with Trinity. I love that Emily’s teasing personality will be forever implanted in our memories with this one piece of paper.
Are you ready to start USING your memorabilia and need some inspiration? Below are some links to episodes with some layouts and mini-books. Paperclipping Members can watch the corresponding episodes in the Member’s Area, but if you’re not a member, you can see the projects in the blog post. If you want to see the tutorials as well, please click here to learn to learn about membership.
Everyday Items (for memorabilia specifically, look for the Starbucks mini-book)
Using Newspaper Articles on Layouts
Vacation Mini-book
Love Notes Mini-Book
Click here if you need my Cheater’s Guide to Scrapbooking Ephemera to help you get going!