Making Your Own Scrapbook Embellishments

One way to make your scrapbooks unique is to make your own embellishments. Sure, craft stores have hundreds if not thousands of embellishments that you can buy. But if you want your scrapbooks to truly reflect you and your family, why not make your own.

Or better yet, why not cheat and see what you may already have at your disposal. With scrapbooking you can be as creative as you like. There are no hard and fast rules about what to use or how to use it. And not everyone can afford to continually buy new embellishment supplies.

One of the most popular do-it-yourself embellishments is memorabilia. These can be ticket stubs, playbooks, programs, pamphlets, brochures, or any assortment of mementoes or souvenirs that one would usually bring back from somewhere special. Birthday cards, gift cards or even floral cards could be used. Also, keep an eye out in the local newspaper for school events or achievements, your own children could be stars.

Try to get as organized as possible with all of the memorabilia that you’ll be collecting so you can find things when you want to use them. Possibly separate items into labeled envelopes or small baskets for each event or period of time. Make sure you let everyone in the family know what types of things you are collecting so they can help out.

For more informal and day-to-day photos look for items around the house. Wine bottle corks can be cut into slices, colored post-it notes with special words on them, fridge magnets you no longer want on the fridge, a deceased cat’s collar, “student of the week” certificates, used stamps, this list could go on and on. Basically, you could use almost anything that would sit flat enough on a page (as long as the glue held).

When creating your pages lay everything you want to use down on the page before gluing it so you get a good idea of how the final page will look. You could also add captions, dates and even Smilies with colored pens.

When you pair these items up with your own photos they make wonderful keepsakes. But if you lay them out on a scrapbook page and make them into an event, they make memories.