Finding the Perfect Scrapbooking Album

Scrapbooking is an absolute crafting phenomenon; the days of old are certainly over, and all generations are heading into the crafting world of scrapbooking. The bigger projects have been left to the wayside by many talented crafters. Knitting is having a resurgence, but crocheting is dying out and sewing one's own clothes has definitely seen a sharp decline in recent years. The new crafting urge is scrapbooking. It seems that just about everyone is doing it, and doing it a lot.

What Does one Need in Order to Begin Scrapbooking?

There are a lot of little things that are considered scrapbooking specialties. From the scrapbooking album itself to all of the stickers and die-cuts inside it, there's a small fortune put into the scrapbooking craft. The good news is that all of these extras are not needed from the beginning; many people start putting together a scrapbooking album with only a small number of initial materials and build up their collection from there.

In order to begin, the materials that are necessary are your own photos that are the basis of your scrapbooking album and some paper backgrounds on which to mount the photos that you want to show off in your album. Although there are a host of specialty papers out there at every scrapbooking and most general crafting stores, these specialty papers are not a requirement in order to get started. Any paper will do, colored paper is nice, or if you have a talent for drawing, plain white paper will do, hopefully with some drawn accents by you.

The beginning of making a scrapbooking album is to organize the pictures into some sort of order. Some people like to do this by the chronology of the events that will be portrayed in their album whereas others like to organize the album into different themes, reserving one page for family, one page for friends, and one page for work. Part of the beauty of making one's own scrapbooking album is in the freedom to choose whatever it is that you want as your album concept. The album is totally yours from beginning to end, you design it and you bring it to life.

Once you've organized your pictures, you'll want to start designing them into pages. Some good advice is to not put too many pictures on each page; the best scrapbooking album will have plenty of room on each page for photo accents, frames and words describing the event pictured. However you choose to put together your album, make it fun - that is, after all, the reason why everyone's doing it!