Layout Ideas

Scrapbooking

Baby:

• What to do with all of those photos we take of our babies? What about a "Year in the Life" layout where each page is a different month? It uses up lots of photos and can be decorated with the names of the months in cut out letters.



• Do we plan our scrapbooks around our lives or is it the other way around -- our lives around our scrapbooks! Here is an example of the latter. If you are lucky enough to have just found out you are pregnant, here's a checklist that will guarantee wonderful, complete scrapbook pages.
  
  New Pregnancy
  - The nursery - before and after
  - Baby showers including invitations, cards, etc.
  - Any special foods or restaurants because of unusual cravings
  - Your doctor and favorite nurses
  - Lamaze class teachers, classmates, classes
  - Favorite sleeping position in later months
  
  Leaving For Hospital
  - Dad loading up the car with Mom's suitcase
  - Mom entering the car
  - The family car, house, pets
  - Sibling reactions
  
  At Hospital
  - Outside view of hospital
  - Clock showing time you arrived
  - Labor and delivery room nurses
  - Dad and Mom together
  - The star of the show - the newborn baby
  - Clock showing time of birth
  - The doctor or nurses holding baby
  - Phoning relatives and friends
  - Visitors
  - The first new family photo
  
  Leaving The Hospital
  - Getting the baby dressed in his/her first outfit
  - Mom and babe being wheeled out the front door
  - Dad carrying out flowers and balloons
  - First ride in the carseat
  - Greetings upon returning home (signs on door or lawn, excited grandparents, siblings, etc.)
  
  New Baby
  - Reactions of siblings, pets, etc.
  - Sleeping on Dad's chest
  - Feeding new babe
  - Generation photos with proud new graandparents
  - Visitors holding baby
  - The man "firsts" - diaper change, bath, nap
  - Monthly picture next to stuffed animal to show rapid growth
  - Baby's favorite toys, sleeping positions, blanket, etc.
  - First visit to pediatrician
  
  
• Baby's Name:
  
  How did you come up with your child's name? Was she named after Great Aunt Bertha or is he named for your favorite cousin Albert? A nice touch on a scrapbook page about your baby's birth would be to say who the child was named after and the meaning of that very special name.
  
  Follow these links for the meaning of most every name you could think of:
  - �ParentSoup Name Finder - the very best name lookup site
  - �The Meaning of Names



• Tie a curl of hair from baby's first haircut with ribbon. Place inside a plastic sleeve and mount on colored paper. Add details of first haircut.



• Make a duplicate of a baby picture. Carefully crop a baby out of one photo and place it as if he or she is traveling in a clip art stroller or wagon. Mount the second uncropped copy of the photo elsewhere on the same page or double-page spread.



• Start a baby album with a pocket page for cards that you receive for the birth of your baby. Decorate page with your child's name, significance of it's name and why you chose it. Add a hospital picture and birth announcement.



• The birth announcement and the first baby picture with an appropriate poem makes a good title page for a baby's album.

Baby's First Year:

• A suggestion on how to use up some of those miscellaneous pictures that you didn't use on other pages -- Start a page with a newborn photo in the upper left-hand corner of the page and go around the page with a 1-month photo, 2-month photo, etc., clockwise around the page ending with a photo from the child's first birthday in the center. You could also choose to put some sort of poem in the middle rather than a birthday picture. The photos may be cropped in a shape (small circle or square) so they all fit on one page or a two-page spread.

Birthday:

• A neat idea for a birthday would be to take a picture of the birthday child at the time of day they were born with a clock in the picture showing the time. If like most babies they were born during the wee, early morning hours, just set the clock to the correct time to take the picture.
  
  You could easily go back to birthday pages you have already done and do a small die-cut or graphic of a clock set to the correct time and attach it to the page as a decorative touch.
  
  
• Cut out large balloons and put pictures of the party in the balloons cut into circles. Also have smaller balloons with no pictures to balance the effect. Decorate with streamers or birthday type stickers.

Childhood:

• "You Are My Sunshine" for your page title. Cut out sunburst shape, using yellow paper, then cut a photo of your child in the shape of a circle to fit inside the sun. Do several photos, each within it's own sun shape on one page.



• Tea party - large cutout, die-cut or clipart of teapot on page. Perhaps stickers of cookies, tarts.



• When doing a page about a silly accident (first skinned knee, etc.), use photo corners to attach the photos to the page, and then use real band-aids over the corners, diagonally. Johnson &Johnson plain old regular bandaids are acid-free and should not harm photos.



• Write a rebus story. It's a story where pictures are used in place of some of the words. For example, if you're telling the story about the first time your child went to school, use a school house sticker in place of the word "school". Use any stickers you have that could help in telling the story. Could be a good way to use up stickers.

Christmas:

• Cut pictures in squares or rectangles and mat on Christmas print paper and add jumbo punched bow die-cuts, making the photos look like Christmas gifts.
  
  

• The card you send out for the holiday, letters, and photos of the family.
• Favorite family recipes and menus.
• List of those who gather at home for the holiday.
• Traditional table settings arrangements.
• Use the Christmas letter that you mail to family and friends each year as one page of a two page Christmas layout. On one side mount your letter which has been printed on acid-free paper and the other side showcases pictures from that year's Christmas celebration. Since most Christmas letters outline a whole year of activities, it is a great way to journalize the year's events on one page.
• Carving the turkey.

Heritage:

• For heritage pictures, make your own mats which look like old documents. Use either a fancy script or one that looks like old handwriting. Using something like Paint Shop Pro, create a graphic that is just text lines using any font you like that looks rather old-fashioned.
  
  Use muted tones that go with sepia prints. If you are printing on a dusty rose acid free sheet, use a darker rose tone for the print. For beige paper, use brown or gold toned print. Use your imagination. Type in either quotations dealing with genealogy or some sort of running text.
  
  Something I used were the names in our family lines. For a picture of my daughter's great-great grandmother, I used the names all through the line of women leading to my daughter's name. Add some sort of quote dealing with pioneers or the strength of women.



• At the grandparents' first meeting of a new babe as well as taking the traditional generation photos, take a photo of the tiny child's hand being held by the parent and parent's hand being held by the grandparent. A photo of just the three hands. After several years take the photos again. Another excellent time to take this type of photo would be when the child turns 18.



• Less is best...less is more
  When mounting heritage photos, the old saying above is true. Old photographs look best without too much embellishing to distract the eye.
  
  Visit Ann Seibel, of Richfield, MN. for layout ideas using simple triangles. A very classic technique.

Homes:

• Take a camera and take photos up and down your street. Include neighbors and pets. Don't forget back lanes and backyards as that is where children spend a lot of time! It will preserve an exact photo memory of childhood.



• Include in your scrapbook a map of your city and/or province showing your house, baby's first house, young married's house, etc. along with a picture of that house.



• On a page about houses and homes lived in, do a narrow double border around a page or two-page spread and print in a poem about "Bless This House." See "Poetry and Sayings" page.

Sleeping:

• Put lullaby words in a border, with ZZZ's floating around page.



• Take pictures of the whole family sleeping -- even your pets!

Sports:

• If your children or husband have been involved in sports and have had articles written about them in the local newspapers, take photos of the events and scatter them around the newspaper article which has been copied on acid-free paper.

Summertime:

• It is the travelling time of year. Color copy a road map of the area you are travelling or camping in and use that as a page backing or as mats around your holiday photos.



• What to do with all those photos of your children in the water - be it the swimming pool or the lake. Cut them into water drop shapes and cluster them on the page. A good way to use up all those photos of the local pool. They all start to look the same after a while!



• Take close up photos of the spring flowers in your garden to use as backgrounds or mats for spring or summer photos.
  
  
• A title for a summer page -- "In the Good Old Summertime." Cut an ice cream cone from brown acid free paper, and cut the "scoops" out of your summer photos.

Wedding:

• The nice wedding idea is to do pages of the bride from babyhood on, growing up, family, special events in the bride's life ending with her wedding day in a 2 or 4 page spread. From the wedding pictures on, do the same for the groom, only backwards. Special events, family, growing up, babyhood. You could make a whole wedding album using this idea if you have enough photos, cards, special wishes, etc. to put in it. Or you could just do a section of a book. Use your imagination. The very first page could be the wedding invitation and go from there.



• Mount several wedding photos on acid-free paper. Trim the paper with fancy scissors. Mount the wedding invitation at an angle, with photos around it. Add appropriate details such as date and place of wedding.



• Take a heart punch and punch several hearts in a long strip of cardstock or heavy acid-free paper alternating their direction (upside down then right-side up). Place the hearts close together, almost touching. Then with a pen "dot" in the outline of the hearts. This creates a lacey or doily effect.



• When doing a wedding album, make a copy of the pianist's music on acid-free paper and use that as the background on some of your pages rather than patterned paper.



• Mat the wedding invitation onto nice cardstock both closed and open and then mount these on to the page for your title page. Create a border using the lyrics to the first dance song.



• Use baby pictures of the bride and groom on the title page beside a photo of each from the wedding.



• A pocket page is a way to start a wedding album since you'll have lots of cards you'll want to keep.



• Collect items from special days such as small bundles of rose petals given to guests. Keep some of the petals, the netting and the ribbon they were tied in. Put them in memorabilia pocket for a nostalgic look.

Yearly Recap:

Miscellaneous:

• Use all those team photos to make one big collage to make a collection of team photos over the years. Who doesn't have dozens of team photos!



• When getting your photos together of a wintery day spent building a snowman, crop two photos of the activities into circles and they can be the two bottom rounds of a snowman. Then cut out a snowman head from white cardstock and a black hat to be the top part of the body. Sprinkle a few snowflakes around and you have a winter page showing your children making Frosty the Snowman.



• For a musical layout use blank music sheets that are marked archival quality on the package. You can either journal on the sheets or use them as mats for musical photos. Draw in a staff and some notes � copying from a sheet of music if you aren't "musical". There are sepia toned pages that would look wonderful with the brown toned acid free markers you can buy. Add your photos.



• All sorts of things can be used to introduce a picture and make a page topper. Take a photo of the school sign in front of your child's school for school photos. Is there a "Welcome to Bug Tussel" sign in front of your town? What is the main industry in your town? One of the main industries in my small prairie town is a salt plant called "Sifto Salt". Do a page of all the wonderful friends and neighbors in your town with the saying "The Salt of the Earth." As I say time and again, just use your imagination and it is amazing what you will find.



• What if you have a few more pictures to put in your 12x12 Creative Memories album but have already put something on the back of the last page of your section and have started something new. Creative Memories can hold both sizes in one album. In the 12X12 album where you already have a title running across the top of 2 facing 12X12 pages, put 8X10 pages between them with your extra photos. You can keep continuity this way.



• Make yourself, the creator of your scrapbook, the star of a double spread of photos featuring the making of the scrapbook your readers are looking it. Have someone take pictures of you cutting and pasting, of yourself as a photographer, the clutter, sitting on the floor with your latest pages. Perhaps document the dates around the photos, on the mats or the die-cuts.



• When planning a photograph to "introduce" a page showing the particular season or holiday, write the name and year of the season in the photo using various methods. For example, in the summer write the year or the place at which you are holidaying in the sand with a toy sand shovel, leaving the shovel in the photo.
  
  Write "Merry Christmas 1998" in an expanse of snow and have your children holding snowballs on either side of this message. Also on the snow theme, write the name of the ski resort you visit this winter in the snow with crossed ski poles. Use your imagination!



• If only a good friend of mine had seen the wonderful tip I saw at Graceful Bee. Perhaps she would still have her wedding pictures intact. She cut all the pictures from her wedding into circles and then finished the edges with fancy-edged scissors. She was not at all happy with how they turned out. They were the only pictures taken at her wedding and she did not have negatives.
  
  The tip from Graceful Bee says to make a color copy as insurance. Use the copy to try out your ideas and then if you aren't happy with the outcome, you still have your original photos in one piece. This is one tip we need to pass around to make sure everyone knows about it.

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