Saturday, February 18, 2012

Arranging Your Scrapbook Pages

My friend Jackie, (scrapbooker and card maker extraordinaire) and I have this running "conversation".
     Jackie: How can you possibly make your layouts before you know what photos you're going to use?
     Juli: How can you possibly make your layouts according to, and based on, the photos you want to scrapbook?

Once in awhile I will do a layout "Jackie's way" based on the photos I know I want to use, but it just seems to take me a longer time.  I usually have my layouts all done so that when I get my photos together, I just "make them fit" the layout. Sometimes I add an embellishment or two (or eight), sometimes I add a title, and I usually make a spot for journaling. For me, making the layouts ahead of time works better.

No matter how you do your scrabook pages and layouts, just do it!

Yesterday I showed you a layout of mine that went from ordinary to hand crafted. Here are a few different ways you might arrange your photos.



One photo and title added (for the title, I used CTMH's Keepsake Felt adhesive-based Alphabet, page 129 of the 2012 Spring/Summer catalog - item #Z1696 $5.95):




Want to add more than one photo?





Companion page - two photos: you could journal on a 3x3 piece of Colonial White (CTMH) and place it in the  top right corner:






Double mat - or not! Sometimes placing your photos on a double mat seems to make it more polished.





Or maybe you want to add just one 5x7 photo (size can be adjusted)





Sometimes I make mistakes (can't believe I just said that outloud!) Some of my mistakes are little "oops" and sometime they are HUGE! I've found that most are fixable.

I have been on a mission lately to use up my older products and move on with the new ones, so while searching my "stash", I found an "irresistable" piece of chipboard. CTMH makes a line of "irresistables" and this piece had to be a couple years old. Irresistables are so named because even though they are white chipboard, there is a design in the chipboard itself. When you ink the chipboard, the design pattern "resists" the ink, there by making a colored embellishment. It was only after I inked the piece that I noticed that it had a small tear in it, and that tear had resisted the ink as well as the design.  I still wanted to use it and I really liked the little bit of the tulip color, but it looked really bad!






After covering the "oops" with a button-topped flower, I like it even more. Granted, this is a small  "oops", and I have made much worse ones. Most can be fixed easily:


Long story short - there is no wrong way to scrapbook! The idea of scrapbooking is to preserve your memories and tell a story.






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