While doing a bit of cleaning, I came across some things from when the gentleman and I started dating – ticket stubs, etc. – and I was thinking it might be a good idea to put these into a scrapbook and get them organized. The problem is, I’ve never done this before and I’ve no idea how to get started.
Do we have any scrap-bookers here? If so, do you have any ideas or suggestions? Is there anything I should be aware of? I’m definitely open to suggestions, ideas, and other cool things.
Thanks!
I tried to put a scrapbook together for my dad for his 75th birthday. It’s harder than you’d think. There is a cable tv show that devotes itself to the art (cult?) of scrapbooking. http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/shows_scb/ will cover all the little tricks, products, etc.
If you have a scrapbooking store by you, ask them if they have “events.” The one by me has an ovenight lock-in (and no, I’m not kidding) where they will even feed you as you scrap your brains out.
More direct to your question…I didn’t do mine in chronological order. I chose things about my dad and devoted pages to those. Movies, music, family, etc. There are about a million ways to organize it, but none of them are right or wrong…just whatever expresses you the best. Have fun!
For the love of all that is holy, do NOT start scrap booking. I have friends who have invested the equivalent of the Gross National Product into scrapbooking supplies - cute scissors, archival paper, glue, templates, cutting boards. It sucked them in like quicksand and before too long, entire rooms were devoted to scrapbooking crap.
And, without exception, every one of them has lost interest in scrapbooking shortly after completing one or two pages.
Do yourself a favor and slap the stuff in a drawer and walk away. WALK AWAY!
Or, alternately, go to eBay and pick up someone else’s excess inventory for cheap.
I would agree with this wholeheartedly, except it sounds like Siege just wants to organize these items that are specific to her and the Dude, as opposed to some folks who want a separate scrapbook for each sport that each child participates in, each graduation, each boyfriend, each vacation…remembering every moment of their lives between the pages of a book.
It is outrageously expensive. I think the single book I assembled ended up costing nearly a hundred bucks (and I didn’t even go the “cute scissors” route!).
My friend got sucked into it when her kids were babies. She’s got a closet full of the crap you refer to. It’ll never be used.
I recommend a “memory box” to put all your ticket stubs and other mementos in.
I agree with the warnings in part, but there’s a middle ground to scrapbooking. You don’t need fancy scissors and every rubber stamp available to get good results. A good cutting mat, a sharp papercutter, and glue are what I use 90% of the time. I know that I overbought when I started, but I’ve become more selective over time. Now when I buy papers and decorations, I try to keep them within a similar aesthetic so I can reuse old stuff on new projects. It keeps my budget to a minimum.
Not to mention my closet space, and the complaints from my significant other… 
I am not a scrapbooker, but many of the people in my family are, and based on having to sit through their books at the last family reunion, this is what I want to offer:
This is supposed to be about your memories and the things that have value to you.
Cutesy matching sets of little things you can paste on the page are not your memories and don’t have value no matter how much you paid for them at the scrapbooking store (or how little you paid for them at the dollar store).
Instead of investing a lot of money in cutesy shit, learn to crop photos effectively and write good captions and short journally entries. That’ll make your scrapbooks interesting and informative, instead of fluffy and annoying and expensive. The best scrapbooks I’ve seen take their inspiration more from, say, high school yearbook design (good spacing, good captions, good photos) than from scrapbook stores.
Right, you don’t need to buy all that junk from the craft stores to make scrapbooks. I admit I have fun with it if some happens to come my way, but I would never go out and purchase it. But boy, I wish I was the person who figured out that a lot of other people would buy all that stuff.
I don’t even really use the word “scrapbooking,” in my head I think of it more as making my photo albums interesting (to me, I don’t care if they are interesting to anyone else).
The one area where it’s probably worth it to spend the money is for archival quality paper that presumably will stay in good condition for billions of years. That said, I don’t use the good stuff for all my album pages, only those where that level of quality is going to be important to me. I will use other, cheaper, paper if the mood strikes – and I already see where the color is fading and the paper is getting brittle – which I’m okay with depending on the project.
I prefer the kinds of books where you add the pages on your own, rather than a set number of pages. That way I keep adding until the book is full, and don’t worry about having the right amount of stuff to fill a particular number of pages. I use the kind of books that are like three-ring binders, and insert pages in plastic covers. There are also books that are classier with more traditionally bound pages, but I like the convenience of being able to remove a few pages from a binder to bring to show my grandma, or whatever, instead of toting around a fat album, and having them protected in the plastic covers. (Plus, I feel like a tool showing someone else a huge album, it’s much more appropriate, I think, to be able to ask “Would you like to see some pictures from <particular event that is actually of interest to the person potentially looking at them, like say for example that person’s own wedding>?”)
What else? I like to combine photos I took with photos I clip from brochures, travel magazines, etc etc. Let’s face it, the photo of the Eiffel Tower with me standing in front of it is personal, and the photo of the Eiffel Tower taken by a professional photographer is a better photo of the Eiffel Tower, so I include both.
Things to save and paste in – maps, matchbooks, travel brochures, menus, printed stuff from hotels, invitations, notes, ticket stubs, programs, wrapping paper, ribbons, gift tags, greeting cards, theater reviews, those tags that show that you paid the admission price at a museum, receipts, postcards, stamps, fortune cookie fortunes, postmarks, newspaper headlines, pretty much any kind of crap that I can glue on to a piece of paper. If you start doing this and enjoy it, you will probably find yourself noticing a lot of things that are easy to save when you visit places.
Don’t be afraid of layering or overlapping things, or cutting things down to get the “essence” of what you are trying to include. You probably do not need to read the entire menu of a restaurant to get a sense that “hey, this was a restaurant where we had fun and I think back on it fondly.” Sometimes I’ll rip something like a large menu or map to get more of a random shape and use it as a background piece for a photo or other thing I want to highlight. Be ruthless and cut things up – cut a greeting card in half to display both the cover and the personal message inside (but if there is a lot of white space around the personal message, trim it or cover it up with something else). Chop the background out of photos to focus on the people, especially if you have several pictures of people in the same background that isn’t really important. Play around with placing things off-center or at angles.
On the other hand, if you have something that is so excellent and important, feel free to give it a page all by itself. A French Laundry menu would certainly rate its own page. Just elegantly sitting there on its own page. Le sigh.
If things need to be identified or labeled, sometimes you can find things to add that do this for you, like the date on a ticket stub. Or you can make labels on a computer and print them out. I usually like to handwrite any notes, which I think makes it more personal unless there is some reason I want to use a particular font.
I have a lot of fun with this hobby – it’s nice to create something crafty where the primary audience is me (and I guess Mr. Del and maybe my mom, but you know really, it’s me). The most important thing is how your book looks to you, so you can be the ultimate judge of what you like and what you save.
Don’t worry – I’ve been in line behind the woman who’s buying 75 sheets of scrapbooking paper at a craft store, and I don’t want to turn into one. On the other hand, it looks like I’ll be moving sometime during the next year and I’d like to get these things organized. There will be no special scissors, rubber stamps, or cutesy stuff, other than the content of a posting on a message board or two. In addition to ticket stubs, I was thinking it would be nice to include a page or two from the program book of some shows we’ve attended and a few photos. Also, my best friend has worked in museums and done preservation work. I’m definitely using the acid-free paper.
I’ve got a couple of practical questions.
To me, a book implies a cover. Do I buy the cover separately or can I buy a book with several sheets and a cover and add to it?
What do I use to attach ticket stubs, etc. to the pages? As I said, I’m not going to pay double for special scrapbooking glue, but Elmer’s white glue doesn’t seem right. Would rubber cement work? I’ve bought and used photo corners in the past to attach photos to pages, but I won’t want to use them for everything.
Thanks again for your advice and suggestions.
I urge you NOT to try to create a scrapbook for a 2-week overseas trip in one weekend, if you’ve never scrapbooked before. Even if your sister (and co-traveller) comes to visit for the weekend and tries to make hers at the same time. By the end of the first day your SOs will have fled the house, you will be frustrated and punchy and decide to start the margaritas, and it’s all downhill from there.
Most of the scrapbooks I’ve seen are modular. You find a cover you like, it will usually have about 10 pages in it, and you buy additional pages to insert. I really like the kind that are plastic sleeves that you create a page and insert it into the sleeve. My sister bought teh kind with peel-back plastic coverings and neither of us liked it.
I used photo corners for anything with a square edge. I mostly used clear ones, because they seemed the least obtrusive for non-photo items.
Anything odd shaped either entirely glued using acid-free gluestick, or I supplemented the clear photo corners with glue on the back of the actual item.
I agree with delphica on buying a binder-type holder and adding loose album pages, or plastic sleeve pages you can put completed paper pages in. You can even fashion a simple cover for the binder out of fabric if you want to jazz it up.
Rubber cement works well because errant blobs can be rubbed right off, for the most part. That’s what I used for my brief foray into paper cutting and card-making. (My first trip to Rubberstampmania was $90 and that was just for some of the basics.)
Elmer’s white glue isn’t the best for this – it dries a little lumpy no matter how thinly you apply it. It’s good to have some on hand, though, if you want to include something more substantial where you wouldn’t see any lumps (like something made out of thick tagboard).
Rubber cement is fine if it is acid-free, and I also like those glue sticks (also acid-free). I think it is worth it to get a real crafter’s glue stick – the kind for little kids that you see in the drugstore for 99 cents aren’t strong enough. I know some people do not like the glue stick in general because it tends to dry brittle, so rough handling of the pages can knock things off. However, this hasn’t been an issue for me because my album pages are the kind in plastic covers.
I have also heard of scrapbookers who use these little sticky tabs meant for collecting stamps on items that might someday need to be removed from the book – the tabs are made so that you can gently remove them without too much distress to the item. They also make double-sided tape on this same principle, and I tried it once or twice. It worked fine on photographs, but I had mixed results with other kinds of materials. It’s billed as “less messy than glue!” but as an adult, I think I am allowed to use glue now. 
The book I purchased had plasticized pocket pages and I slipped the decorated craft paper pages inside that pocket. I used a glue stick, but I didn’t put any actual precious photos in mine. I scanned all the old stuff and used the copies.