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When you first look at the piles of photos, papers, and crafty things, scrapbooking can feel extremely overwhelming. What if I told you that it doesn’t have to be though? All you need to do is go, and use these 4 steps to start getting your scrapbook pages and books together in no time!
Pick Your Theme/Photos As You Make Scrapbook Pages
It all starts with photos or a picture in your head if you are not working with photos right off the bat, to get scrapbook pages done. I know many scrapbookers who don’t actually start with photos, and simply want to create a page base on a collection of papers and embellishments they have. Maybe you’re getting ready for a tropical vacation and you want to create some pages ahead of time for it. No problem.
If you have Christmas photos to scrapbook, that will most likely be your theme. Heritage photos – your goal will probably be some classic or everyday life collections if you don’t have any heritage themed collections. This is why it is nice to have a place for your “everyday” collections so you can pull those out for the basic settings.
Your first step is to simply know where to start, and to do that you just need to figure out what you are working with, whether you are looking at the photos in front of you, or deciding from a collection or theme in your mind.
If you’re stumped there, pick a general color theme in your photos. Creative Memories has straightforward tonal themes to help you fit what you need at any given time.
Just pick a theme first and foremost.
Pick Your Collections to Match Your Theme
Once you know your theme, you can move onto the collections and picking what you want to use to get your scrapbook pages done.
This is why we focused so hard on getting organized in my previous blog posts. Because once you are organized, you can then move past overwhelm to get scrapbook pages done. You will know what you have to work with and where it is. In fact, before even moving ahead to creating pages, I highly recommend you get organized first and check out those posts on tips for doing that.
If you are working on a tropical vacation page, you probably want to pull out your folders that are holding those collections and ones that could work for that as well, like beach themes.
Narrow it down from there, holding papers up to your photos to find one that compliments them nicely. I recommend that your next step be to pull out the stickers, embellishments and mats that match that paper so you can start visualizing how you want your page to come together.
A sub point to this step would be to also find the coordinating colors that go with that paper and collections. Creative Memories now provides a key on the cover sheet of their paper packs that makes it very helpful to find those easily.
Again, I recommend you get your cardstock and solid colors organized as well.
Once you start getting your pieces together for your page, you can move on to putting it all together!
Putting It All Together
When it comes to the steps for getting scrapbook pages done, this is the step I tend to take hours on, if not picking out my paper in the previous step. I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get pages done and make them look stunning, which is why I can take so long agonizing over this step.
One saying I love from Noreen Smith of Creative Memories Home Office is that “there is no wrong way to scrapbook.” Even in these tips I offer you in my blog posts, you can do whatever works best for you in order to get scrapbook pages done. These are tips that have worked for me and my process and I hope that they can help you find your own process.
You can simply mat photos and stick them on the page, if that is your jam. There is no wrong way to scrapbook.
One tool that has helped me immensely is the blog by Creative Memories. They are always putting out ideas to create pages with instructions and pictures to help you along the way. They also offer a monthly, virtual crop on their Virtual Crop Facebook page which is a fun way to your pages done as well.
What I do is pick my collections, then find a sketch or an idea to play off of. I tend to save ideas as I go by taking a screenshot of them and adding them to an album in my Google photos so I can refer to them later or during a crop.
If you would rather piece your page together without additional inspiration, getting the pieces together from your collections for your theme will be the biggest step for you. Once you have those, you can easily get a page done by simply matting the coordinating colors on the papers.
You could copy a design you find or take certain techniques from it and turn it into a whole different page. The point is to find inspiration.
Practically, I pick a base for my page, usually a designer paper, mat my photos on a coordinating color. Then I stick them down on the base, after adding any additional layers that may be needed on the base to add more dimension.
Embellish and Journal
To wrap up your page, add some pizazz with your coordinating stickers and embellishments. You’ll want to make sure there is a title, whether big or small, to help bring the page as a whole together.
To do this, you can use a sticker or embellishment with a word on it, a mat with a fun title, or cut something out on your Cricut if you have one. With CM stickers, I still use my Cricut for titles, but I find that I use embellishments a lot for titles as well, which makes it easier to coordinate.
Another tip is to create fun embellishment clusters to keep the eye moving around the page. Simply pick 2-3 to put together in a corner or between photos for fun and to add even more dimension.
Journal what is happening on your page. Use the names of the people in the photos, where it was, the occasion, and the date so you can look back and remember, or so anyone can look at your book to know the story. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes who may be looking at your page. What would they need to know about your page if you weren’t there to tell them about it? Journal that.
Conclusion
Scrapbooking doesn’t have to be complicated. It is very easy to overthink it and take so long trying to get a page done, we simply walk away and stop doing it. To get scrapbook pages done, enjoy the process and find your creative outlet. The trick to enjoying that process is to follow your own, keeping in mind that there is no wrong way to scrapbook. I highly suggest you get organized, then get scrapbook pages done by picking your theme, finding the collections/elements that match that theme, putting it all together, and adding pizazz with embellishments and telling the story with your journaling.
You can do it!
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