Ever thought of creating a scrapbook but not been sure where to start? Can’t decide between digital scrapbooking and the old fashioned way where you get your fingers messy? Not sure what you need? It’s easy.

All you need are some photographs or pictures and imagination!

Depending on whether you want to get messy or something quick you will need to decide whether you are going to hand make your scrapbook or whether you’re going to use a digital scrapbook such as ScrapbookFlair (www.scrapbookflair.com), you could indeed have a mixture of the two dependant on what time you have to spare. Scrapbooking can be as expensive as you like, you could purchase specialist papers, embellishments, albums, glues and journaling pens. Or you can use papers and cardstock found around the house, you could even use old wall paper scraps and a normal leaver folder as an album. If on the other hand, you decide you want to use a digital scrapbook, you will find that embellishments and background papers are free to download off the internet as are some of the scrapbooking programmes.

If you are designing a scrapbook, digital or otherwise you need to consider what your overall theme is going to be, will it be your life, your family, your childhood, school years, or you pets? There are many themes that you can use and just because you have a theme doesn’t mean you have to use the same colours all the way through. Once you have decided on your theme, you then need to get together all your photographs that you have from that time, you might have train tickets that you want to scan in and use as embellishments or cards sent for a special occasion. Once you have all these together you need to decide on how many pages and what size you want your scrapbook to be, in the USA the main size is 8.5” x 11” whereas in the UK the main sizes are 8”x8” or 12”x12”. Alternatively if you have a nice photo album, you could design your pages to fit inside the clear pockets. So you have your theme, your photo’s and you know what size your album is, now you need to start looking at the layout. If you have access to a computer you will have the option of resizing and printing your photo’s in different sizes. If you aren’t using a computer at all you will be limited by the size your photographs are. If you are having a small album you might find you are only able to fit one photograph on the page with a little journaling and an embellishment. The bigger pages may be able to fit multiple pictures, embellishments and more journaling.

So now you’ve decided which photo’s to use you’re ready to start scrapbooking. Before getting the glue out, start by laying out the individual parts onto the page, by doing this you can move things around and decide where you like them best before sticking them down, on a digital scrapbook this is a little easier as items aren’t glued onto a page but placed with a cursor. Make sure you are happy with the placements before sticking things down. Start by gluing onto your backing papers and then repositioning your photograph(s) before adding any journaling and embellishments onto the page last. Once the glue is dry you can put the page into your album, make sure they all go into individual covers to keep the embellishments and papers sticky finger free! Once you’ve done one page, you’re ready to start the next page and you may also like to do some two page layouts using the two pages side by side to scrapbook one event or day.

If you are using a digital scrapbook program, you may find that you can have your scrapbook pages printed as photographs to go into a normal sized album of 4”x6” or 5”x7”, I am currently scrapbooking some pages at 4”x6” to complete a photo scrapbook of my life to date, although I have scrapbooked by hand before at the moment I prefer the digital scrapbooking program as I can resize photos straight onto the page and even use the same photos in sepia or grey scale as well as the main colour photograph. The embellishments don’t stick up off the page and the journaling can also be printed straight onto the page alongside the photographs. Some of my pages are journaling only with embellishments and no photographs which also look just as good.