Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The Scraps of Life - Where to Start

Do you collect everything that links itself to your memories? As these trinkets stack up I collect them an put them into a folder. I keep a folder for every month to collect birthday cards, holiday cards, or any event that may come up. Looking at the memories with a relative time associated them will motivate you to keep on top of archiving them!

When I find some time to sit down and scrapbook I keep it simple. Our family is lucky enough to have major events spread out though out the year so I like to stick to one book spread for each month {it also helps to remind you of how time flies by when each page represent one month!}. First things first, I pull out the folder of memories and spread them out so that I can get a look at the big picture.

Once everything is out there it is easier to settle on a color scheme or theme for the month. Is there anything that all of these scraps have in common - a color, a flower, maybe a phrase?

Like with any project you have to lay the ground work first. {now this is important!} Pick two colors of paper {2 pieces of each} that fit your memories and each other. These two colors are your background colors, one color on the left and one on the right. With the other two pieces you can make photo mats, bars, and a few embelishments. For example, the background color on the right becomes embelishments on the left. What do you think of the example pages below?





This simple idea can save a lot of money and frustration because you can use plain old solid color papers. There's no need for the expensive specialty papers and the page automatically looks like it is planned and has a theme. Not only that...I follow this process through out the entire scrapbook and the entire thing looks like it belongs together as consecutive pages!

An entire book that looks coordinated, imagine that! And it was easy and cheap too! Have you ever tried a process like this? Do you like the look of simple cut paper embelishments? Once you perfected this process try more cut paper ideas! Branch out to different shapes and lines or maybe even throw in a small amount of a third color for a pop!



Let me know...Did it work for you?




Don't miss the next post! The best embelishments you will ever need and there free!