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Hi, i’m Carla Sylvester, and yes, I am a certified scrapbook addict. I’ve always loved playing with words and colors and photographs. I grew up in an Air Force family, and over those years I just, okay, so I’m also a pack rat.

So I kept collecting things that I couldn’t let go of. And then, I had my own Air Force career, and I collected more photos and I knew that someday I wanted to put them in a scrapbook, and then the day that I learned how, all the doors opened. Since then I’ve been scrapping for many years, personally and professionally and I’ve met really good friends in doing that.

Some of those friends and I have now formed a blog, it’s called The Crafting Journals.com, and we’d love to have you come visit us. In these videos, you’ll see lots of scrapbook projects, and all these projects are made by people who contribute to our website, The Crafting Journals. We hope you’ll come join us there, and we hope you’ll be inspired to scrapbook, just as much as we are.

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Adding texture to your scrapbook pages makes your beautiful memories pop even more. Some people prefer to have little to no texture on their pages, and that’s fine. Some people prefer to have it very flat, as flat stickers, flat photos, and so on, and absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, if you do like a little texture on your page, I have quite a few examples here that I’d like to show you to give you some ideas of the many different ways texture can really add a little something special to your pages. First I have this two-page layout with this cute little cowboy, and I want you to take a look here on the left hand side, because this is actual real leather that has been popped through the hole with the help of some eyelets to keep the page from tearing.

And that leather, along with the gold stars that are actually dimensional and the elevated letters all support that theme of the cowboy and just really make this page look so much more lifelike. Here’s another double page spread, Fall, and here there’s a few touches of texture here and there, but it’s just enough to give you that feeling of fall. There’s the ribbon. There’s the buttons and leaves, and especially down here, this little cluster, the button, the leaves, and the fabric tag. They kind of all come together and just feel really warm and cozy, just like fall. And not to mention the title itself, which is corrugated and then inked over. So again that rough texture just kind of adds that little special extra something that does make it feel like fall. And one more double page spread here.

This layout is so simple, but the texture just tells the story. These waves are all hand stitched. Now you can imagine that took a lot of time to do, but look at the impressive, magnificent effect. And you could get a very similar effect with a sewing machine, too. OK. Now I have some single page layouts for you to look at. This is just really so beautiful. The journaling is on this acetate piece, and this is something that you can do is print on vellum or acetate, which let’s you get your journaling in over a photo or over a patterned paper. That along with these little glass bottles and the sand dollar medallion jusr reinforce this ephemeral kind of feeling of being at the beach. Cork.

Who would have thought to put cork on your scrapbook page? Well here it is. These look like they’re probably premade letter stickers, but you could also add cork on a page with a roll of cork or pre-cut out cork. and it kind of just depends on what you’re trying to talk about with your page. But here it’s more of a masculine theme, and so cork just lends itself so well to that. Holy cow. This is just so much dimension I just hardly even know what to do with it. But it’s just so beautiful, and such a great example of how you can add real, real texture to your page. It’s a wooden letter. There’s a metal circle. There’s a different kind of texture in every single letter of this scrapbook page title. So just really, really pretty. And here’s another really, really pretty one. You don’t see a lot of textural embellishments here, but what you see instead is first of all this banner that is handmade, tied with string, and it hangs under this awning that is hand-cut and then popped up with foam dots.

So it adds just a bounce of texture at the top of the page without being overwhelming at all. On our Christmas page here, the felt just feels warm and cozy, just like Christmas. And then our twinkling snowflakes give you another feeling for the season. Story Time page, and look at the stitching. So sewing on your pages we talked about a minute ago. This is something that is totally doable for somebody who has a sewing machine, knows how to sew.

I aspire to that one day. But these pages with their stitches, I feel like they just look so finished, and it’s such an unexpected addition of texture. And finally, again a page with lots and lot of texture going on, but the subject is still easy to see, because all these texture elements stick to a simple color scheme. So we have fabric going on and gem stones and labels and chipboard and more gem stones. And don’t miss this, with all these eyelets and the twine laced all the way through, and the stitching, and the punching, which has little tiny pinhole size holes in there that are done by the punch.

That is a lot of texture. And more glitter on the bottom. So this is kind of like texture on texture on texture. This is a kind of the other extreme of texture, but it’s gorgeous. It looks beautiful, and it’s just one example in addition to all these others of how you can use texture on your page. Use a little. Use a lot. But do think about adding a little texture, because it really just adds so much to your page.

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Painting on scrapbook page, like painting anything, is a lot of fun. It really doesn’t need to be scary. I want to show you a couple of pages that we’ve used paint on, and then we’ll look at a couple of techniques. So on this page, paint is used in a couple of different ways. It’s used as a mat for this photo. So you just brush the paint right on the page, and wait for it to dry. Then add the photo. And then over here, paint is used along with a foam stamp. Now I have to tell you, trends in scrap-booking, just like trends in fashion and everything else, come and go, and I think it’s fair to say that a few years ago it was trendy to use foam stamps and paint on scrapbook pages. And it’s something you really don’t see as much sometimes anymore, but it’s a very valid technique, and I think it’s still a lot of fun to do.

Here’s another page that uses paint, again in a way that was once upon a time the trend, and who knows, may be again in the future. But you know what? As I said before, with anything in scrap-booking it’s your scrapbook. You do what you want, and I happen to love paint in scrap-booking. And here is another page from a friend of mine. This is paint used on a transparency, and if you’re not familiar with transparencies, they are clear acetate sheets. And this one came with a decorative edge around the outside and these words printed on the acetate, on the transparency. And then what you can do is use paint on the back side to highlight the parts that you want to highlight.

Here this brown paint highlights this title in journaling, as well as the border. So those are a couple of ways you can use paint on your scrap-booking, and now I want to show you just how easy it really is. So first we’re going to do that first technique that we saw where the paint is used as a background. I am going to use this actually as kind of my painter’s pallet here. This is a non-stick surface that’s also a protective surface for your desktop. And I’m going to shake up my paint, obviously very inexpensive acrylic paint that you can buy at your craft store, and I’m going to use just a little bit there. If you feel like your paint is too thick, you can always thin it out with a little bit of water, and I think this is OK right now. We’ll see how opaque it is, and then you can also see how it can look when it’s diluted just a little bit. How hard was that? Not hard at all. And if this were my photo, I would wait for that to dry, put that down right on top, and that’s just how easy it would be.

If I wanted to, I could add a little bit of water to that, mix it around a little bit. Again, this is a really fun technique to experiment with, because you can then see just how dry the paint gets, how wet it gets. And if you don’t have one of these craft sheets at home, you can use a Styrofoam plate. Styrofoam is good because it doesn’t absorb water. If you use a paper plate, it’s going to absorb the paint, and you’ll get less mileage out of your paint because some of it will actually be absorbed into the paper plate. But a plastic container lid is good, anything that’s plastic or non-porous can be used as a pallet. So there are two little samples there. As you can see, the one on the left is little bit more opaque, and this one is a little bit more transparent. I’m going to set this aside to dry for just a minute, and then I’m going to come back to it. In the meanwhile, I want to pick up another piece of paper and show you another technique. So these paints, I’m going to grab all three of them here, are distressed paints. You may have seen them in the store and wondered, “Well, gee, what do I do with that?”

This is going to be just one of many different techniques. And as with all of these paints, you want to read the label and understand what they’re good for, because these particular paints are good not only on paper but on lots of other surfaces. But since we’re scrapbooking and we’re doing some basic things, we’re going to just looks at what we can do with it on this one little sheet of paper. And again, this is just going to be one technique of many. So I’m going to dab a little bit of each of these colors onto my pallet, a.k.a., my non-stick surface. And I squished that one down kind of hard. I probably didn’t need to do that. And now a little bit more of a third color. Now I’m going to spray a little bit of water here to dilute this, and then I’m going to take this piece of paper in my hand, and I’m going to just kind of wipe it gently across these colors. And we’re going to take a look at the effect that that gets us. Kind of interesting. You know what? Because I like this so much, I’m going to try the other side of this piece of paper, and let’s see what we do here. This may end up muddying the colors, because if you swish this around too much, especially with the colors I used, red and green, total opposites on the color wheel, when you combine those two they’re going to make brown. But here, it’s not bad.

It’s kind of a brick red, which is what I started with anyway. And so if you set this aside and let it dry, or better yet, take your heat tool and dry it a little faster using a heat tool, you’ll then be able to do other things on top of this. You could stamp on top of it. You can use it as a mat for a photo. You could write some journaling over it. So many different kinds of things that you can do with a decorative background that you made with paint. Now let’s come back to this first page that we used, and I’m going to put it right on top of this mat that has paint on the back side of it. So I’ve got my white background, and this paint is already dry. So now I’m going to show you how to stamp with paint. And I’m actually even going to use a different kind of paint. These paints are a little bit higher end.

They’re very popular with people who like to do art journaling, but they’re also great for scrapbooking and all manner of mixed media and crafts and painting. So I’m going to take a fresh foam brush for this one, because I don’t want to mess up the first one that I used. I’m going to take my copper paint and my stamp. Actually I’m going to need a little bit more paint. There we go. OK. Now for stamping with paint, you don’t need a lot of paint on your stamp. You want to coat it, and I’m using my foam brush to coat my stamp with paint. And the foam brush has kind of a chiseled end, so it makes it really easy to do, but just enough to coat it. And now I’m going to stamp my letter onto my first layer of paint. Just press it gently, pick it up, and there’s my letter A. OK. And then obviously that’s all there is to it. From there on, you would just continue stamping the rest of your word. And on this stamp I had a little less paint. This one was thick, and I don’t know if you can see, but around the edges of my first letter A I’ve got a little bit of paint lifting up around the edge where the paint was still kind of thick on that foam stamp, even though I thought that it was dry, or that it was a thin, even coat. It was actually a little thicker than I thought.

So I’m going to stamp a couple more letters here, and there’s my friend Ann’s name. With a variety of paints, you can really just have so much fun with scrapbooking. And each paint has a different purpose. So take time to look around in the paint section of the store or maybe in that stash of paints that you have at home. Pull them out, and bring it onto your scarpbooking page.

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When you’re scrap booking, you can create your own customs backgrounds using spray-mists. You can, also, use these mists to change the color of paper that you already have, to change the color of other page elements that you already have, and so lets see how some of these work. There are lots of different types of spray-mists out there, so you want to make sure you read the packaging carefully and understand how each one works. With this particular one, you want to tap the bottle, not shake it, but just tap it a little bit. This is a glimmer mist and you want get those little glimmery pieces to circulate inside liquid so that when you spray it you’ll get the effect that you intended to, and I’m protecting my surface with a silicone or a non-stick mat, which will whip clean, when I’m down, so here we go spray glimmer mist.

Now, you can control what the mist actually looks like depending on how far away from the paper you go see how this was much more spattered effect and this is much more of a concentrated effect and now have a three other sprays different brand and these actual have scent to them, and I choose these colors, because I happen to like reds can you tell, but, also, because I thought the red and oranges would look like nice to together so now lets experiment with these colors. Yellow is really nice, and if i go in with a little orange, I’ll get a different pattern. You can imagine making a sunset using these colors kind of create your own sunset background so that’s how that page looks, and to my left, you can see how that same technique works on a project, so this was piece of 12-by-12 scrapbook paper american flag, but if you wanted to have more of an aged look, then you would spray it and this is very a light color, coffee color, spray, but it’s got just enough of that brownish hue to it to make this lag just like it’s been around a while now. So now let’s take a look at what we can do with some templates.

All right, so I have a new piece of paper here polka dots on one side solid on the other that’s such a tuff choice, but P’m gonna go with the solid, because I want to see what really some of these templates look like. This is kind of a classic looking template. I’m actually going to tilt it on it’s side, because i’m feeling that way today, and i wasn’t suppose to shake this, but I didn’t shake too much I promise, and I’m gonna step back, mainly, to keep myself from spraying more of the table, then I really wanted too. Now, leaving the template in place et’s layer of this red, and now, let’s see what we got. Check it out. So that’s just stage one, though, I have another template here that I want to add to this, so I’m going to put this template right about there and now with some other spray inks we’ll do some more spraying. You can really have a lot of fun just playing with these inks and stencils. One thing is when you do pick up the stencils make sure that you pick them straight up or wait till your ink is a little bit dry just so you don’t smear it around, because you wouldn’t want to ruin your look so this is what I achieved with those couple of stencil.

Now, if you layer this on top of patterned paper you’ll get still a different look so let’s go one more round with the sprays and stencils this time on top of this pattern paper, so first, I am going too.. I’m laying this, by the way, right on top of my, my mat, you’d really want to whip that off but for right now I’m just gonna leave it right here and spray some this the brown right on top of all those pretty colors, and it is a dark brown if you used a lighter brown you’d get an effect more like this flag. Now, I’m going just add another stencil right on top, again, I haven’t cleaned these stencils off in the interest of time but I’m going to just lay one stencil right on top of my pattern paper. Now, I’m going to carefully lift off this stencil. We can see this paper now has quiet a different look from when it started. So you can see that with the addition spray inks and stencils you can really customize your paper to fit a color you want, to fit a look that you want. Let met show you just one more page.

This particular page combined inking and spraying and stencils so we had some inking around the edges and there some stamping in there, but there’s, also, some stenciled spray and stenciled areas, and actually, even these photo corners were originally bared chipped board, but with color spread inks, they were transformed to colors to match the page, so these are some ideas for what you can do with spray inks and stencils.

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Distressing paper for your scrapbooking and other paper crafts is a lot of fun, and some people actually find it to be a little bit of a stress relief. But mostly it’s fun. So I’m going to show you a few different techniques on this one piece of paper, and they’re actually all illustrated on this scrapbook page. So let me just give you an overview of the techniques first of all.

The edges of the paper are torn, which gives it kind of a ragged appearance to begin with. And then on top of some of these torn edges, we have inking, adding a layer of ink which adds a little extra depth and also adds kind of an antiqued or distressed look to the paper. And then in addition to that, there is actually some stamping and spraying going on in the background. It’s kind of subtle, but it’s really interesting to see. So let’s take a look at some of these techniques. OK.

First of all, tearing, and we have a whole other video on tearing paper, but just briefly you want to hold the paper in your left hand, then tear towards you with your right hand. And the side that’s in your left hand is going to be the side that shows this ragged edge, which is really what we are trying to achieve with tearing paper. Technique number two, sandpaper. I have here a sanding block, and I also have two different grits of sandpaper. Any of these will work for this particular technique. I keep the sandpaper in my toolkit just because it’s so flat and disposable and easy to use.

So I just kind of fold the paper around my finger and have at it on the paper. So as you sand, and especially along the edges, you start to take away some of the top layer of that paper. And as you do so, you’ll see it starts to turn white, and that is because this paper has a white core. And you can see now how aged that already looks, just with a little bit of sanding. You could continue that or just stop wherever you reach the point that you’re happy with your paper. Third technique is distressing with a distressing tool, and there are many different types of distressing tools. This is one I happen to have, and it has a little razor blade right in the middle there, but it’s that notch that really helps you get right up against the edge of the paper, and you kind of pull it towards you. And see how it’s just turning that end of the paper into really kind of a ragged edge. You actually get a few little crumbs of paper falling off your project here. So those are three different things you can do. Number four, we’re going to introduce some color into the picture. So I have some different inks here. I have a chalk ink, and I have some distress inks.

And again, any of these work. They just give you slightly different looks, particularly depending on how you use them. So a chalk ink is just that. It’s an ink that is a chalk. So it goes on very dry and very smooth. It’s very soft, because they effect is soft and the pad itself is also soft. So just by applying the pad of the ink to the edge of the paper and gently stroking it, you get that aged or antiqued effect. Now let’s see what happens with a distress ink pad. And these come in many different colors, as do the chalk inks. So each color is going to give you a slightly different effect. So this one, because of the shape and the size of the pad, you get a different application on your paper surface.

And here I’ve hit just the edge of the paper with this ink pad. But if you wanted to, you could go in a little bit heavier, and it’s almost easier to do that if you lay your paper down, or if you bend your paper. You could experiment with different ways of manipulating this, and it’s a good idea to practice before doing this on any project of yours for the first time. And that, again, is of course true of any of these techniques. Try it out first before you use your last precious piece of paper on your beloved project. So those are four ways that you can distress your paper, but you can actually combine some of those techniques together. So on an edge of the paper where I have gone over it with the sandpaper, I can now go back again with the chalk ink and add another layer of distress to it. So I’ve got a faded layer, and then on top of that I’m adding this brown ink for more of an older look around the edges.

And I did use this distressing tool once before. I’m going back with it just a little bit more, because the more you do that, the more you get that curled and ragged edge. And you can even use your fingers to curl it a little bit. And then again go back on top of that with the ink, and try using the ink in different directions. You can use it on the back a little bit. Curl your paper a little bit more. So some of this has already been distressed with the distressing tool. Go back and tear another part of it. Go back with your distressing tool and distress some more. So you can continue layering those distressing techniques. One other thing that you can do is stamping. With some stamps, stamps that are designed to look distressed, this is another way that you can add a distressed look to your project. So we’re going to do a quick one of these, and I think I’m going to choose this one. Apply the distressed ink to the stamp.

Got it good and inked up there. Right across my project. And now I’ve got the looks of scratches with this particular stamp. This one gives you a coffee stain look. This one gives you kind of a burnt edge look, and so on. So with these different techniques, you are now well-equipped to go ahead and distress your paper.

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A great way to add texture to your scrapbook page is my crumpling your paper and there are actually a few different techniques to doing that. First of all, think about the paper that you’re using to crumple. I have two different types of paper here. This is a heavy duty card stock and this is a lightweight patterned paper.

You can already imagine how differently they will feel in your hand and how differently they might respond to crumpling but let’s just take a look and see. So, here I’ve got the heavy duty card stock and I’m just going to crumple it up just like I was going to throw it in the trash can and then…it’s kind of hurting my hands actually because it’s so heavy. The edges of the paper are kind of, not sharp, but just harsh.

All right so that’s how it looks with one quick crumple there. And then, with my lighter weight paper. Yeah, I almost was going to throw that but I decided I shouldn’t. Here is how that looks. So, clearly with the finer grade of paper, lighter weight of paper you’re already getting a finer crumple.

But crumpling isn’t limited to just doing it just like this. You can actually get even more of a crumple and a different texture if you wet it down. So, I have a spray bottle of water here and I’m going to go ahead and spray. And I’ve got my surface protected here with this non stick sheet. So you wouldn’t want to do this on your grandmother’s finest wooden dining table.

So the paper already starts to absorb the water just as soon as you sprayed it and from here yu can crumple it again. Open it up. And it starts to almost look and feel like distressed leather because it’s so thick. So you could continue this process for a while. I’m going to stop right here and I’m going to go ahead and try this other piece of paper.

And, by the way, I’ve noticed on this card stock the ink color from this card stock is actually coming out on my hands and down here so when I go to crumple this green paper, watch out. I may actually end up with some red on it. Eh, maybe not.

So look at the fine detail in this lighter weight sheet of paper that’s been crumpled up. I don’t know how well you can see that but it’s really interesting. It’s a little bit therapeutic. To just sit here and crumple paper.

So, you could let this dry as it. You could take a paper towel and kind of take away some of the water and then you could either let it sit around and let it dry for a really long time. Or you could take an iron to it. So you could put this on your ironing board. Again, I’d take some care because you wouldn’t want to transfer the red from your paper to your ironing board. But take a dry iron and just lightly go over it until you’ve kind of pressed out your paper.

And that’s going to give you still a different look. And here, I have an example of how those three looks actually are with card stock from the dry crumple to the wet crumple if you let it just go ahead and dry on its own. And then when you iron it out with a dry iron it kind of gives a flatter texture.

And I want to show you one other example of a page that actually use crumpling on the title strip of this page. This is just a dry crumple and it’s actually, the edges have been torn as well. So I took the paper, I tore it, and then I crumpled it up and then flattened it back out and attached it to my page.

So those are some ways you can use crumpling to add texture and interest to your scrapbook pages.

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Hi I’m Carla and we’re talking about how to tear paper. Yes, that’s right, how to tear paper for scrapbooking, because believe it or not, there are actually a couple of little tricks that are helpful to know. So here I have a piece of cardstock and the first thing to know is that cardstock, a paper, actually has a grain. So if you hold the paper this way, you can see how it kind of flops over to the side. Turn it 90 degrees and you see it flops to the side just a little less. You can tell that the grain is actually going in that direction which is causing it to flop over. So it’s just a little bit easier to tear with the grain.

So if you happen to give that some thought as you’re scrapbooking, as you’re preparing to tear your paper, it’ll be a little easier. And so to tear the paper, you want to hold it away from you. Hold it in your left hand and then with your right hand pull toward you. So like this. And what you get is this nice, beautiful, ragged edge. And you get to see some of that inside of the sheet of the cardstock, inside that torn edge. Now why would you want to tear paper? Well, first of all, it’s kind of fun. Right? And secondly, it gives you, again, a nice texture. You get a nice texture from it and there are certain effects. You could think about doing this on a beach page where you’re tearing the sand and tearing the waves. You could create a nice landscape from that. Now I’ve torn cardstock that has a solid core. I also want you to see cardstock, or paper, that has a white core and how that changes.

And this actually is white on the backside so you know for sure it’s white at its core. So this way is a little bit more limp, this way a little less so, so I’m going to tear it this way. And this time I’m going to tear off just a border. So, again, pulling toward me. And you can move your hand a little bit around this way and that to get a little bit more of a wave pattern. And it’s always a little random. If you’re trying to tear it perfectly, forget about it. That’s not what tearing is about.

Tearing is about that kind of random, ragged feel. Now, if you notice just real quickly as I was pulling toward me, I’m getting that ragged edge on the piece of paper that’s in my left hand. The piece of paper that was in my right hand, the ragged edge such as it is was on the other side. So you want to think about where you want that ragged edge to appear, to be on your final page, and keep that in your left hand. So ragged edge, left hand. And that’s about all there is to tearing paper.

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A great way to customize your scrapbook page is with punches and in another video you can learn how to use craft punches. Right now, we’re going to talk about edge punches. I have two different punches here and I want to show you how they work. Punches work by punching a die cut-looking pattern into your paper. You insert your paper into the punch tool and right under this head punch is where the actual punching takes place. That’s where the die is. In fact, let me just flip this over for you and you could see that’s your punch blade right inside there, so when you press that lever, the punch comes through.

You’ll just put your paper in there and then punch and there you go. There’s that beautiful pattern. Now, to make your second punch, so it’s a continuous pattern, you’re just going to put that paper back in again and then there’s a pattern on the wings of the punch that you’ll just line the punched paper over. The punched paper goes directly over the pattern on the punch ’til it’s just like that and if you’re wondering, “Gee, have I got the paper in the right place?” just look at this printed pattern. The next punch is going to take place right about there, right where the design is printed, so I’m going highball it a little bit and bring it right back in there and do my next punch and there it is.

If by any chance you should happen to miss a space, with most punches, you can actually go back in and capture it and I’ll show you what I mean here. I’ve got it in there, I punched, I take out my paper, oh my gosh, I missed a space. I can go right back in there. Make sure that piece that I need to capture is in there under the head of the punch and still make sure that I line up that pattern of the paper over the pattern on the punch, press again. You can punch the entire length of your paper this way and then you’ll end up with a border that looks something like this. This is a great example of a masculine page. A lot of things in scrapbooking tend to be floral, but this particular punch lends it really well to this page.

The other edge punch I have for you works in much the same way and in fact we’re going to use that same piece of paper that we punched before, but first let me show you the front of the punch. Again, you see the design printed on the punch head as well as on the wings and then on the backside, you see where the die is. This punch has a button that unlocks the lever mechanism, so when I slide that button, it unlocks and I’m ready to punch. My paper just goes right in here. I punch and there’s my chevron design and then to continue punching, I’m just going to line it up the design on the pattern on the wing of the punch and punch again.

Those are edge punches and, again, a great tool to add to your scrapbooking kit and a nice way to customize borders on your page.

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Craft punches are a great addition to your scrapbooking toolkit and I’ve got a few different types here for you to have a look at. These are all craft punches and so are these over here. And these are edge punches which you can learn more about in another video. So with our craft punches, you can always start by getting just a couple of basic shapes, like this circle and this scallop circle. And then as you gradually grow your collection, you may want to add other shapes like this leaf and butterfly; themes that you know that you will scrapbook with. So let me just show you how these work.

The scallop punch, and many other craft punches, actually have an opening in the back that lets you see what part of the paper you’re capturing. So I’m going to put this book paper in and I can see that if there were a particular word I wanted to capture, I could do that just by looking through the bottom side of the punch. And then just press lever and I’ve popped out my punch shape. And by punching multiples of those and layering them, that’s how we created the little flower on this card. Here’s another type of punch that looks a little different. It’s a little bit more slim, it takes up less space.

It works a little differently because there is, on the back side, there’s this little lock, there’s this lever, and when you push this lever the punch opens, and now you have your built in lever to punch your paper. So just like the other punch, often it’s very helpful to turn it upside down to punch your paper and not only does this turning it upside down let you see what part of the paper you’re capturing, but if you were going to punch a whole lot of leaves, you can see whether you’re punching…

You can see that you have paper under your punch rather than the hole from the space before that. So you can just punch a whole bunch of leaves. So once you’ve punched a bunch of leaves like that, then you’re all set to group them together on a project like our page over here. One more punch I want to show you quickly is the corner punch. This is a corner rounder and true to its name, it rounds the corners of the paper. So you can see, you just insert the corner of your cardstock into the punch until it’s nice and snug all the way in, and then punch the lever. So this is a nice alternative to having pointed corners on your paper, is having a nice little rounded corner. So those are just a few craft punches and as I said, lots of fun to play with and a nice addition to your scrapbook toolbox. And if you’re like some of us, it can be another scrapbook addiction.

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Sometimes you’re working on a scrapbook page, and you just need a circle. And so, let’s see how to do that. Well, you could do it the old-fashioned way. You could trace a circle, and these are three that I traced last night using different jar lids. You could trace a plate and then cut it out with your scissors, or you can do it the easy way.

There are different types of circle cutters out on the market now. This is one circle cutter, and it actually allows you to cut, like, a whole, whole lot of different sizes of circles. And you can also find the center of your photo by putting it right in the cross-hairs there. This piece is the blade, and my little triangle here is going to fit into the notch of whatever size circle I want, and I’m going to rotate it to cut my circle.

If you wanted to cut multiple circles, you want to start with the smaller ones first and then you work your way out. So, let’s just do a few circles here. First, I want to get my triangle seated right inside my notch. I’m not cutting yet because in order to cut, I have to press really far down. But this allows me to just kind of get a feel and see if there’s anything. This is just a solid cut, solid piece of card stock. But in a moment we’re going to try this with a photo, and you can really see the difference.

I like to start with the blade right around the 8:00 or 9:00 point if you imagine this as a clock, and this is 12:00. This is 6:00, so I am around 7:00 or 8:00 or 9:00. Press down. Then rotate that blade around. Now, I’m not going to pick it up just yet because I want to cut a few more concentric rings. So, let’s just do that a couple more times here with my blade into the notch, press, and rotate.

All right, I’m going to take everything away and we’re going to see our circles. I actually forgot to mention that I had taped this paper down beforehand which kept the paper from moving. And that’s what helps make those circles work, come out just perfectly.

So, I’ve cut the circle with card stock, but now let’s see it with a photo. One of the things I really do find useful is to actually tape my photo down to my glass mat. If I didn’t mention before, when you’re cutting with a circle cutter, you definitely want to have a glass mat underneath and not a self-healing mat. The glass mat just really helps the circle cutter move so much easier.

So, I’ve got my photo taped down, circle cutter’s on top. Now this is where I get to see how much of this photo will actually capture with my circle cutter. I really don’t even need to put the blade in the hole just yet. I can use my finger to trace around and see where I want it to go.

If I put the cross-hairs on Nancy’s face and circle around like that, I’m going to get just her face and not the bag and this whole sort of scene. I’m going to move the cross-hairs down, more to the center of the photo, and that way I can capture a larger circle. I can get her head. I can see how this piece is going to move around her head. It’s going to get the bag, so this is my hole.

And these all do have measurements on them, but a lot of the time unless it’s really important, I don’t necessarily even look at the measurement because I’m looking to see how much of the picture I’m capturing.

All right, so I’ve got my blade in, and I’m holding the frame of the circle cutter down very firmly, pressing the blade down. Circle around. I felt like I might have lifted the blade up a little bit down on the down-swing, so we’ll just see what happened there. Nope, I got it. There is Nancy.

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Die-cuts on your scrapbook page are very similar to stickers, except that they don’t have adhesive on the back. So you can treat them like a sticker or not. I have here an assortment of die-cuts and a die-cut, some are just plain shapes, but a lot of them now have printing on them. So, it’s just a plain piece of paper that’s already been popped out and cut into a special shape.

Because they don’t have adhesive on the back, you can do things with them like turn them into tags. Like I could punch a hole right in this thing and make it a tag, and it could be a tag for a gift or it could be a tag on a page or on a card. On this example we’ve punched holes through the mittens, inserted eyelets, and strung twine through, so now these can dangle on a project. And then here’s an example where individual die-cuts are grouped together in a border. Now this border can go on a holiday page. I have a few other projects here to show you. This page has die-cuts, all these flowers, this little bird, they’re all die-cuts, and then they’ve been popped up with foam dots.

They really kind of help carry through the story on the page. And they’re grouped together. Here is another example, and here we have die-cut borders and these two have been layered together, another die-cut border up here, and another die-cut as a title, and really there’s your page. How simply is that? And then on this page over here it’s kind of the opposite of simple.

It’s where these die-cuts have actually been clustered together. So, this label and then there’s the butterfly, the birdcage, and then three flowers, and then the bird on top. Plus the pieces up here are all dies that have been grouped together and layered together to add interest to the page, add dimension to the page, and help tell the story of the page. Die-cuts, like almost everything with scrapbooks, can also be used on card-making. So here’s a very simple card and these pieces here are just dies that are adhered together with foam adhesive and with a little greeting on the front, and that’s the card. On this example, these are die-cuts that have actually been connected with brads.

So we punched the holes through and added the brads and it kind of twists and turns into it’s own special card, which is really, really cute. So, don’t forget about die-cuts when you’re thinking about ways to embellish your page and help tell the story.

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One of the really fun things about scrapbooking is playing with stickers, and I think those of us who’ve been scrapbooking for a while love to collect stickers. I’ve got just a few different kinds over here. We have alphabet stickers, stickers that can be a title, stickers that are flat, stickers that are dimensional, stickers that look like metal. And they’re just so much fun to play with.

So I want to show you a couple of things that you can do with them, and then we’ll look at some pages that use stickers in different ways. I want to show you these stickers, not only because they are beautiful, but also because they’re dimensional. If you look at them sideways, you’ll see that there are actually layers of foam in between layers of sticker, and so that’s what makes them so dimensional and lets them just pop right up off the page. And you could actually create your own dimensional stickers in a similar way. If you have something that you really want to give just a little lift to off the page, you can take a flat sticker like this one. Just peel it off your sheet. And by the way, when you’re handling stickers, a pair of tweezers comes in really handy so you’re not always trying to use your fingernail to lift them up.

Reverse action tweezers like these let you not only peel them up, or at least get it started peeling, but also to kind of just hold it in place until you get your sticker in just the right spot on your page. But I’m not going to adhere this down just yet. I am going to flip it over, and I’m going to put some foam dots on the back, so that I can elevate that from the page. So these foam dots are double-sided adhesive. You just peel them back from the sheet, and so that part is already sticky. You put that down on your sticker. And really for a small sticker you probably only need one in the middle.

I am going to add a couple more. And I will tell you, though, if you were to put just one in the middle, that would be fine. A way to keep that sticker from adhering down once you did have that one foam dot is to apply baby powder to the back part of the sticker, and that removes the adhesive quality, and then your sticker won’t stick down. It will just be the foam dot holding it up. So back to the foam dot here. I’m just going to peel these off and put down my best friend. By the way, I’m doing this just for demonstration purposes, but if you had a sticker like this that was really a journaling sticker, you would want to do your writing first, before you put foam dots under it, because it’s going to be a little bit more difficult to actually write on here now that I’ve got it with foam. But that gives you your elevation off the page, and if you can tell how that’s now lifted off my little tag. It’s a great way to add dimension to your page. OK. Let’s look at some of those pages. So we have this page which actually has several different stickers on it. And you can see that they’re actually mounted on the circles, and there’s a reason for this. When you’re using smaller stickers like this, you want them to be grounded.

They need to have kind of a home. If this tree were not here, and these Santas were just floating around, they kind of would be like Santas in space or something. I don’t know. So you want to have a base for stickers like this. Now with this page, these stickers don’t have a separate base, but because they’re grouped together, and they are on this space, and there’s a defined space that they’re living in, it serves the same purpose. So those stickers are kind of all clustered together, and they’re telling a story. And then we also have another title sticker right down here. On this page, these metallic-looking stickers are again mounted on a home, and we see also illustrated here is one of those design principles, using a visual triangle to let your eye move around the page.

These three little cupids are forming an imaginary triangle, and so it kind of adds some motion to the page. Here’s a page with a whole lot of snowflake stickers, and they’re beautiful just as they are, and they also already have a little bit of dimension with the foam dots under them. But when you cluster them all together like that, you get even more impact.

So think about when you have stickers that are similar like that, you can see they’re similar stickers but different sizes, think about how you could group them together to add impact to your page. You could do the same thing with flowers, for example. This next page has several different stickers on it. Again, kind of the visual triangle with the groups of flower stickers, but also a title. And another thing that’s nice about this is there’s this title, but then additional stickers are added in. So you could combine stickers to create a scene or tell a story. Here’s another example of stickers that are mounted on homes, but then they’re kind of interspersed with photos so they kind of help tell the story.

They’re almost like they’re own little photographs. And then finally, over here we have a page that again has several different kinds of stickers. Our little animals here have their own little home. They have that same kind of mat that we talked about a minute ago. And then the alphabet stickers create their own titles and help tell the story, and actually it is Toy Story, by the way. And those are just some of the different ways that you can use stickers. So have fun with them.

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Scrapbooks aren’t necessarily all about photos, a lot of times you’ll want to include memorabilia into your scrapbooks. All those little pieces of life that you collect that have meaning, that help you tell the story. So here I want to tell you a little about the kinds of memorabilia that you can include in your scrapbook.

We’ll start over here with the smash book, because this is the kind of genre people associate with memorabilia especially, and this book is packed with things. You can see the playbill, the clothing tags, and so-on, just full of those kinds of little pieces of life.

But even in a more traditional scrapbook, you can still include your memorabilia. With this project life album, we’ve got some movie tickets, and then we’ll show you a few other pages that have other kinds of memorabilia.

On this page we have, a ticket again, and that’s just glued right onto the page. This page, this piece of canvas actually was, the tag from inside this hat, so that’s a great way to keep that part of a memory. Now here’s a page that has lots of memorabilia, and it’s all grouped together in a cluster in the corner of the page. We’ve got tokens, tickets, hotel keys, just all kinds of different pieces that help tell the story of this page.

Then finally, over here is something really interesting to point out, because if your memorabilia is too big to fit on your page, you can still include it on your page. This is actually a book cover that was photocopied, and printed out on the page. You can do the same thing with say, a playbill or a program from a show. You can take your whole playbill, shrink it down to size and then it fits on your page and you still have room for your photographs.

Over here I have all kinds of other memorabilia that I’ve collected that I can’t wait to put in one of my albums. So I hope you’re doing the same, hang onto your memorabilia, include them in your scrapbooks because they’re part of the story.

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One of the key elements of your scrapbook page is, of course, your title. The title tells the viewer right away what this page is about, and so there are lots and lots of different ways to create your title for your page, and I have just a few examples here. Probably the absolute easiest way is premade titles. So you just buy this in the store.

It’s a sticker, and you put it right on your page. And this particular one comes with other additional little die cut pieces that are also stickers that you can add to the page to carry out the theme that you have going on already. Another way that you can add a title to your page is without alphabet stickers. So here we have a page that has Molly and John in alphabet stickers, and this also almost acts a little bit as a title. And this is either a die cut or else it’s cut out from a sheet of paper. So that’s actually another way that you can add a title to your page. It would be something that looks like this, and then you could just add your own adhesive to it. Another way to add titles to a page are die cut letters, and these you can buy premade as these were, or you can make them with a die cutting machine.

And of course, with a die cutting machine, you can totally customize what you’re doing. And here she was able actually to do the title in every different color that she wanted to include on the page. So that makes it really, really easy to customize your page. Yet another way to create your title, and for that matter your journaling too, are stickers. I love these kinds of word stickers that you can just assemble and put together and group together in a way that really lets you customize your title and your journaling, and also adds a really interesting design element to the page because you’ve got all these different little circles and rectangle going on.

And finally, when all else fails I always say, it’s the computer, because with your computer at home, you can print just about any kind of title that you need to do. And so here I have several pages from one of my albums, and I will run through these for you.

These pages are from the album I created after my deployment to Afghanistan. And so what I have here first is a title page, and all the journaling, or all the titles, were created with the computer. So I did this on a plain piece of cardstock, and then I crumpled the paper to make it look a little bit more rustic. And if you want to know more about how to do that, take a look at our other video on that subject. So there’s the title page, and then I was able to create divider pages. I sort of created chapters in this album, so each chapter had a title on it. So this is my title for daily life that I printed on the computer. And I also created all the journaling on the computer. So especially when you have lots and lots of journaling, the computer is really the easiest way to do that.

I’m a big believer in having a lot of your own handwriting in your albums, but when you have this much to write, it’s a lot to do. But I do still have a little bit of my handwriting here, and then I have this other element that also was done on the computer and then later cut out. So these are just some of the many, many different ways that you can create a title that tells the viewer what your page is all about.

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When you’re designing a scrapbook page, one of the decisions you have to make is what colors am I going to use on my page? Well, one way to do that is just to look at a paper pad and say, oh, I love these pretty colors. I’m going to use this on my scrapbook page. And that might work. One thing that you will know about that pad is that all your colors will go together because they’re already designed that way. But will they go with your photo?

Another way to select your colors is by looking at the colors in your photo. So I want to run you through an example of how you can do this. So I’ve got a photo here of my husband, and we’ve got a lot of color going on in this picture. So he’s wearing a red shirt, and we’ve got a multi-colored piece of furniture, and, oh, another crazy multi-colored rug. So what color is going to work here?

What I like to do is look at the subject, the focal point in the photo, and pick out a color that might work. So he’s wearing this red shirt, so I looked at this red piece of paper, and it actually might work. But what does it do to his skin tone? It also makes his skin tone a little bit more ruddy. So that’s something you wanna think about. If I put it against this brown paper, see what it does, how that changes? Now what is popping out at you? I’m seeing the background here, the browns in the photo that are similar to the browns in the paper.

And now I thought, well, what about the plant? No, we don’t really want to look at the plant. This color could work because it’s actually the opposite of the color wheel of the red, and so it actually might make the red pop a little bit more. And this color, it’s kind of a tan color, but it’s called kraft, kraft with a K, K-R-A-F-T. It’s actually a really good color for a lot of different kinds of scrapbook pages. And so I thought, well, what if I try kraft?

It’s okay, but I actually might want it more for the background of my paper. I don’t like it right next to this photo, again, because it draws my eye more to this background. So in the end I actually chose the green because I felt like it made my husband’s shirt kind of really pop out more. But I did like all the other colors in the photo. And so I thought, gee, maybe I could bring in a piece of patterned paper that would coordinate and not clash, with just a touch.

Now this isn’t a finished scrapbook page. I would do, definitely, other things to this page. But
this gives you an idea of how you might go about picking colors to coordinate with the key photo on your page.

So one way to do that is by looking at the colors in the photo. And by the way, here’s another great example of that. If you look at this page, you see all the green in the photos, and the color of the children’s clothing, and these papers go spot on perfectly with it. The black background makes everything pop, and so this is a great example of where coordinated papers do actually work really well with the colors in the photos.

A separate way that you could also think about finding your colors is the mood that you’re trying to set on your page. Is it a peaceful mood? Is it a happy mood? If it’s happy, then you might want bright, cheery colors. If it’s peaceful, you might want serene blues and greens. So I have this picture here of my husband and me, not very colorful. So because there’s so very little color in it, it can go a lot of different ways. At first, I did look at the colors that are in the picture, the blacks and the greens, and I thought, well, that’s boring. So let’s go for some color, because this is really all about our relationship and how much fun we have together.

And so in the end, I went for kind of a crazy mix of colors. I love red, that’s my happy color, my color for excitement. And so I went with this really colorful page that ended up looking like my sample over here. So here you see the colors are kind of very exciting, and it can work because the colors in the photo are very simple. If this had been a very colorful photo like the first one I showed you, it might’ve gotten just a little too busy.

Finally, one way to look for colors for your scrapbook page is to use a color wheel. A color wheel looks like this, and you can find it at a craft store. And without going into all the many different ways that you can use this, I just want to say that you can pick one color from your photo. Suppose I were to say, gee, I really like the purple on this page. You have several different arrows here. You can point that arrow to one of the colors, and then look at the shape that it is a part of, like this orange triangle. And it will tell you what other colors would go well together with that one color.

Now there are many different types of color schemes, and this color wheel comes with instructions that tell you how to find them all. But just know that a color wheel can actually be a really great assistant in helping you choose the colors for your scrapbook page.

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Sometimes when you’re cutting pages or photos for scrapbooking, you’ll find that your paper trimmer just isn’t enough and your scissors just aren’t enough. What you need is a craft knife, otherwise known as an X-Acto knife, a crafts knife, whatever. Craft knife, when you’re cutting with it, you’re always going to want to have a surface on your table so that you don’t cut right into your table.

This is a self-healing cutting mat and there are also glass mats that you can get. For most purposes, a self-healing mat will be fine and so we’re going to show you now how to do that. I’ve got my 12 x 12 paper. The best way to get a nice straight line is to line up your ruler on your cutting mat. If you have a cutting mat that has a grid on it like this one does, it’s really helpful because then your paper can line with the grid, your ruler can line up with the grid and then you just cut along the edge of the ruler, but once you have your ruler in place, just hold it down and slide the blade all the way down the edge of the ruler and there you go. I obviously didn’t start my blade at the top of the paper because I’ve got this bitty piece here, but you can just go in there with your blade and nick it right off.

One thing you do just want to pay attention to is which end of the blade is the cutting end. It sounds kind of silly to say, but sometimes the cutting edge of the blade will actually be the straight side. The other thing of course is don’t cut yourself.

Sometimes you’ll want to actually do something a little bit more elaborate than just a straight line. You want to cut curves and that’s where really a glass mat is much more helpful. With the blade against a self-healing mat, it tends not to work on curves as well as a glass mat. I have my paper on a glass mat in order to cut these curves and what I want to do is I want to cut this flower out of the middle of the paper so that when I put my photo on top, I can take that flower from the paper and add it as an accent on top of the card stock.

When you’re cutting with a craft knife, when you’re cutting curves, you want to try to move the paper rather than the knife as you work your way around the curve and so it looks something like this. If you happen to be cutting something that has an inside and an outside like, say, you’re cutting out the letter E, you would want to cut out the inside first and then cut the outsides later. Anything that’s like small or inside the item, you cut first and then cut the outsides. Now, I’ve got my flower all cut out from my paper and I’ve taken it out and I can add it to my scrapbook page.

A craft knife is a great tool to have in your scrapbooking kit. It’s really great for cutting thin lines, definitely great for cutting the inside of something out and also for cutting curves.

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When you’re designing your scrapbook pages, very often you’ll want to have a photo really pop off the page, and one great way to do that is by matting the photo. And, matting the photo, also, makes it more important. So, when you have your page, you want to have a focal point. You want to have one place where your eye goes first. If you mat a photo, it’s one way of adding importance to that photo so your eye will go there. So, here’s how you’re going to mat your photo: I’ve got my photo and the color I’ve selected for my mat and here’s how I do it. There are definitely different ways to mat your photo, but what I find easiest is to turn my photo over and apply adhesive to the back first.

So, I’m just applying that tape runner to all four corners and then I’m going to align the corner of my photo with the corner of my paper, just to about an eighth of an inch. A good size photo mat is generally about an eighth of an inch to a quarter of an inch, just depending on what you’re doing for just a really simple mat. Depending on circumstances, you might find other reasons to do other sizes, but that’s a very typical size. So, I’ve got my eighth of an inch, and by the way I’m just eyeballing this, it doesn’t take very long before you get to figure out what is an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch.

But, you’ve got an eighth of an inch there and there, and then I’m sliding the paper over until I can see where my blade on my paper trim is going to cut the bottom of my mat at about an eighth of an inch. If I’m not sure, here’s a kind of a little cheat that I do: I slide my blade up and then I put the arm down and I just very gently give it a little tap. When I lift that up, I can just barely see where the blade nicked that paper and if it’s not quite where I want it, I can move just a tiny bit and that nick will not show if I have it in the wrong place. Then, I just slide the blade up, and I’ve created the mat for one side of the photo, and then I go and do the other side.This way you’re only having to cut two sides of the mat. I’ve seen people try to put a photo right in the middle of the page and measure around it.

That’s way too hard, so just put that photo right up against there. Again, we’re going to look and kind of get a gauge for where that mat will be. Once you get to know your paper trimmer, you’ll know, for example, if the edge of this plastic arm, that’s pretty much where you want your photo to be in order for the blade to give you the width of a mat that you want. It’s going to vary from trimmer to trimmer, so once you get to know what your trimmer does, you’ll have a better feel for what size mat you can cut without even thinking, without even doing that little blade trick. So, that’s my matted photo, and I want to give you just a couple of other thoughts on photo mats. Here is another photo that we just matted, so you can see how that’s going to really pop when it’s on a darker colored background. Now, here’s a page, that has two mats and the photos are the same size, the mats are the same size, and they kind of form a joint focal point as opposed to one standing out more than the other. Here we have a page that has one photo matted and one isn’t, and so you can kind of see that the photo with the mat becomes more of a focal point on the page. It stands out a little bit more and it’s totally fine to have some photos matted, some not.

You just want to think about which really stands out on the page. Also, you can think about varying the width of the mats on your photos, and here is an example of that. So, you don’t have to just stick with that one eighth of an inch all the way around. A really nice look, especially if you’re trying to, again, add importance to the photo, is do a thinner mat, and then a wider mat, and then a thinner mat again. So, there’s just some thoughts on what you can do about matting your photos.

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When you’re creating your scrapbook pages very often you’ll find that you have a photo that would be great if it was just that one person not in the picture, and I’m not talking about your great aunt Emily in the third row of the family portrait. I’m talking about something like this photo here where somebody in the crowd got in just on the edge of your folder, and if we could just get rid of her that would be fine. So guess what, we are going to do that. So I’m going to put my photo right into my paper trimmer, and then I’m just going to cut it. Simple as that. and she is gone. And I just want to reinforce to you, don’t be afraid to cut your pictures. A lot of times, a lot of times we are afraid to take the scissors or the paper trimmer to that photo and really it’s okay. And you can always print more if most of the time if you are dealing with a photo that is very old or very precious to you and it’s the only one that is one time I advise you not to trim your photo you might want to get a scan made of it first and get a new print and then crop it if you feel like you need to crop it. But otherwise cropping is not a bad thing.

And in fact this page right here is a great example of how a lot of different photos have been cropped all to the same size and it makes such a beautiful scrap book page.

So here is another example of a photo, I would like you take a look at this, would you crop this or not? you might want to have a really close up of him or you might want to keep that background as part of the picture because4 it shows a certain point in time it shows the house that you lived in so again it’s a personal opinion. But if you do decide to crop a photo please think about how you are going to crop it.

You might not want to do this, and you might not want to do this. Now why is this? That’s because when you start to do really funky shapes with your photos it actually takes the, it takes the interest away from the photo itself. It takes the eye towards the outside shape of the object rather that the subject of the photo and that’s where you want the attention to be. So these are made with decorative, this one was cut wit decorative scissors this one was cut with our saw punch. In most cases, again you are the boss of you scrapbook so you can totally do this if you want to.

But if you really want the attention to be on your photos, try to avoid the more unusual cropping shapes. Now Circles and ovals are fine and this photo we cropped to a circle le and it looks just fine. And in another video we will teach you how to do this, but my recommendation is, is to general for cropping circles, oval, squares or rectangles.

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Most of us who scrapbook or do any kind of paper crafting can’t live without our paper trimmers. I have two different types here to show you. They work in a very similar way, but they’re a little different, so that’s why I wanted you to see a couple of different types. This one is a rotary trimmer and it has a swing out arm. It comes all the way out to 15 inches, so that lets you have plenty of room to cut your 12 x 12 paper. The arm lifts up and then your paper goes right under here.

Now, this is a rotary blade trimmer, so it has a blade that slides up and down this arm and it’s not going to cut until you press down on the blade and so here’s how that works. I’m going to press down, pull it toward me and lift the arm and there’s my cut. Now, it also works in the other direction, so I’ll show you again how that works and just press and push and there you go.

The measurements on the trimmer let you see just what size you’re cutting, so let’s say you need to make your 5 x 7 photo mat, you’re just going to look on this ruler that goes across for the 7-inch mark and then use that as your guide and if you wanted the paper to be 8 inches, you would move it farther out and so on. You can also use the ruler on this arm to measure your paper going in the other direction.

So, that is the rotary blade trimmer, but there is another type of trimmer. I refer to it as the stationary blade trimmer. I don’t know if it has a special name, but that one looks very similar to our rotary blade except the blade doesn’t sit as high up. This is our blade here and so the arm also doesn’t lift up. It just flips sideways, otherwise, very similar. My arm swings out, I’ve got my measurements up here, measurements going this way, and so, again, if I wanted to, say, cut my 8-inch piece of paper, I just put the edge of the paper against that 8-inch mark. Make sure the paper is against the ledge up here and then there’s my cut.

The only other thing that you want to pay attention to regardless of which trimmer you have when you’re using one for the first time is just know where the blade is going to cut. The trimmer will typically have either a little ridge that the blade goes into or in the case of a rotary blade, it may have a rubber mat for that blade to cut into, so just take a look at where that blade is because you want to know for sure where your paper is actually going to be cut. Again, it’s a matter of personal preference. Neither is better than the other, but you’ll definitely want to have a paper trimmer before you get very far at all in your paper crafting.

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Trying to design your first scrapbook layout can be kind of intimidating, what do you do, where does the picture go, what else do I need on my page. One of the easiest ways to get started with designing a scrapbook page is to use a sketch or a page map and you can find these online. These two are from the PageMaps website, but you can find others as well.

This kind of gives you a road map, a recipe, a pattern for how to design your page and it will show you where to put your photos, your title, your embellishments, and so on. If I’m going to do that, then all I need to do is look at my page map. I found one that I think is going to go well with my photos and then collect together all the elements that are on that page and then I’m going to be ready to scrapbook that page.

Once you’ve done a few of those, then you start to get a feel for the design of a scrapbook page and there are few rules that help to create a pleasing scrapbook page. One of those is called the rule of thirds. If you take your 12 x 12 scrapbook page and you’ve divided it into thirds vertically and horizontally, you get something that looks like this. When you look at where those lines intersect, that is where you want to place your focal point in order to make it really interesting. I can place my focal photo here, I can place it here, I can place it here and then add my other page elements around it. If I were to add it just right in the middle, it’s just not quite as interesting.

Just keep in mind though, you are the boss of your scrapbook pages, so nobody can tell you what to do. These are just design principles that have been shown over time and that are used by scrapbookers, photographers, and so on.

Here, we have actually a page that exemplifies that principle. The photo is right over here in that sweet spot of the rule of thirds and this is also a great example of just how simple a scrapbook page can be. It doesn’t need to be complicated or intimidating and yet it still has some fun elements to it with the ribbon and the clear photo letters.

Another principle of scrapbooking is the rule of 3’s or the visual triangle and here’s a page that demonstrates what we mean by that. We have three clusters of embellishments and when you take any three items and it can be a color, it can be a shape, it can be an embellishment and you repeat it three different places on the page, so that those three points form a triangle when you draw an imaginary line between them, that’s a visual triangle and what that does is just help draw your eye across the page.

Those are a couple of things to keep in mind when you’re designing a scrapbook layout. If you’re working on a Project Life scrapbook, that’s an entirely different kind of page as you can see here. The page protectors are divided into multiple little pockets, so you can treat each pocket like its own little canvas or its own little scrapbook page. You could have an entire photo take up a pocket. You can have a photo with a label or an embellishment on top of it and you could even have a photo that stretches across multiple pockets.

Either way you scrapbook whether it’s with Project Life or a more traditional method, these are some things you can keep in mind when you’re designing your scrapbook layout.

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When you’re scrapbooking, adhesives are really important because that’s what holds the whole project together. So I have an assortment of adhesives here and I want to show you just a few. Over here we have an assortment of wet adhesives, or glues. glossy accents and other products such as diamond glaze can be used as an adhesive, but they also allow you to apply a hard glossy accent to your project. Zip Dry is a really popular wet adhesive with paper crafters because it’s made especially for paper crafting and then we also have a glue pen which has glue, but acts like a pen, hence the name. So let me show you how that works. Glue pens are really good, particularly for small items like these butterflies I’ve just punched out. So all you’ll do is apply a little glue to the butterfly, and this one is a squeeze and roll, so you kind of have to squeeze the pen a little bit, and then there’s my glue, I’m going to flip it over, and this would be easier if I had a pair of tweezers, but I don’t so there it is. So that’s my butterfly. We also have a glue stick. Everybody’s familiar with what these are.

This one is photo safe. I’m not personally a big fan of glue sticks because I just find I get really messy with them, but some people really like glue sticks for scrapbooking so it’s a personal preference. Over here we have an assortment of dry adhesives and they come in several different categories. So here we have several different types of tape runners and glue runners and this lets you just lay down a line of a dry adhesive, and here’s an example of how that works. So here’s my butterfly, and then I’m just going to give this a little stroke and then the adhesive is right there and you can see how it’s sticking to my finger and so that one goes down, and many of these are also refillable, which is nice. Another way that I could adhere a little butterfly like this is with a glue dot, or Zots, is this particular brand name, and the way this works is you have this strip with these tiny dots of glue and all you have to do is pick up your item lay it on there so that it picks up that glue dot and then put it on your project, just like that.

In addition to the rollers and the glue dots, 3-D dots or foam dots are also a really great adhesive; they’re double sided foam and give you a little bit of dimension on your project. Double sided tapes are also great to have, some of them you can just tear off the roll, others you need scissors, and the red liner tape in particular is a super duper strong adhesive.

So if you’re putting something together that you want to make sure it really stays or you’re not sure if it’s going to stay, chances are this will do the trick. And then Washi tapes or paper tapes are single sided, but they’re decorative so they’re also a really nice adhesive to have on hand. And finally there’s a stapler and we all know how a stapler works. Some of us might be a little leery about putting staples in our scrapbook, so that’s again a personal decision. If you’re concerned about archival quality and keeping your scrapbooks safe for generations to come you may want to steer clear of staples and metal things that might rust later on, but if that’s not a concern of yours then have at it with the staples. So again, wet adhesives, dry adhesives, and let me just show you this one page.

I love it, because it’s beautiful, but it also is a great example of how all these different adhesives can be used, from the dimensional items, to this square that’s popped up with the foam dots, to pieces like this that would use maybe even glossy accents to hold it down, an assortment of adhesives will stand you in good stead in your scrapbooking.

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When you are just starting to scrapbook, there are just a few essential tools you really need, and these are my personal preferences. But I think almost everybody would agree you need some paper, you would like to have a paper trimmer, although some people do prefer to use a craft knife.

A ruler, a pair of scissors, definitely some adhesive, and an assortment of pens. I’ve got several here, this one actually writes on photos, which is nice to have. And then, this pen, as well as these, are journaling pens. And I like to have a few different colors, these are kind of my standard journaling colors; black, brown, and kind of a denim blue. I also love to have a mechanical pencil and a white eraser.

Not everybody really uses or needs these but, I just love them because I’m always trying to where I want to put something on my page, and that let’s me do that and then erase the mark very cleanly. Some embellishments are nice, some stickers. You want to pick the one that are going to go with your scrapbook. You don’t have to load up with all of the stickers in the store right away, just pick a couple of things that are going to work for your project. And then, of course you want to have your photos. So, with these basic things, you are ready to start scrapbooking.

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A lot of us who are starting to scrapbook are trying to decide whether we need all these products that say ‘acid free’ and so on. It really depends on what your purpose is in scrapbooking. If you’re creating a scrapbook that you want to hand on to your children, and your grandchildren, and you want to last for the next fifty or a hundred or more years, then certainly, you do want to think about your projects and all the products you use in them, being safe. Archival safe, photo safe, acid free, so that they will last for that long time. Because if the products are not necessarily acid free, they can break down over time.

Think of a newspaper, and how if you picked up a newspaper from a hundred years ago, that paper would be crumbling in your hands. That’s the kind of thing we’re worried about. The wood, the lignans, the acid in some of these products that cause them to deteriorate over time. So, if that’s the type of scrapbooking that you plan to do, then you definitely want to look for products that are labeled in a way that you can be assured that they will last. And I’ve got a few here, so I just want you to see. For example this says, ‘acid free’. This paper pad is lignan free, acid free, so these are just some examples of products, as most products are, that are specifically made for scrapbooking that are archival safe.

Now, you may be like me, I’m not making scrapbooks for my children and grandchildren, I don’t have any children. I make scrapbooks for me because, it’s just fun. And, if that’s where you’re at then really you don’t have to worry so much about those ‘acid free’ or ‘archival properties’ of the things that you put in your scrapbook. And we see a lot of this, especially in things like our smash book.

Where we’re putting in staples, and wood, and fabric, although fabric is not so much of an issue because it tends not to have wood products. But those are the kinds of things that you want to think about. So if you’re definitely creating a scrapbook for posterity, definitely look for those products that are archival safe. And if you’re not, just go for it. Anything that you want to put in your book.

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Hi I’m Carla and we’re talking about scrap booking. One of the first decisions you need to make when you start scrap booking is what kind of scrapbook you want to use. So I have several different types of scrap books here. One of the more traditional types is a post bound album. So when you open up the album, you’ll see it’s held together by 3 posts, and these actually screw apart in order to allow you to add more pages to your album. And each page protector holds your pages is in place.

So that’s a post bound album and of course say like almost all scrap books come in different sizes. So this is another post bound album. It’s a different size and most albums do come in different sizes, but again you can see where the posts hold pages together and I’ve got this one pretty full. I’ve packed it about as full as it can get.

Also a D-ring album is very popular. This is the small one and this is actually a different type of scrapbook. It’s one that use to collect recipes my friends. This is also a, a larger version of the D-ring album and as I open this up you can see it’s just like the notebooks we had in school, only bigger and better, and this particular style of scrapbook is, is um one that has not one big page protector but a page protector with a lot of little pockets to put things in so you may have maybe familiar with Project Life there are several different types of scrap booking brands that followed this kind of format.

Over here is a really fun format and this is a Smash Book. Smash is a brand name. Again they’re different brands that have a similar kind of look to them where the pages are already pre-decorated and then you go in and put in your scraps. And it’s a little bit more of a free form style of scrap booking, lots of memorabilia as well as photos.

Now I’m gonna show you really old school. This is the first scrap book I ever made its from Creative Memories and it’s a strap hinge album. So strap hinge means that there are these plastic straps that hold the pages in place and the straps thread through little metal kind of staples and that’s how this book is held together.

Finally scrap booking doesn’t have to take place in a book, It can also take place, as we say, off the page. So here’s a example of a canvas, that’s actually been turned into a memento, a piece of memorabilia with photos and the same kind of decorations that you would use in a scrap book. so you get started scrap booking think about what kind of scrap book you want to use. What type of scrap booking you want to do. and then you can go find the perfect scrap book for you.