Handmade Holidays: Scrapbooks

The holiday crafting is in full swing 'round these parts. What are you making? Where did you get your inspiration? I will be adding some new tutorials and printables over the next few weeks that I have been working on so stay tuned for those.

Holy mess batman, the really embarrassing part is that its pretty much looked like this for weeks...

 The first gift on my list is a 12 x 12 scrapbook. When I make scrapbooks for myself I usually only make one page at a time and I base everything off the photos themselves. Making scrapbooks for others is a whole different process, which I thought I would share with you, because I'm cool like that.

As you know I am typically very organized, like most other human adults I have way to much to do, and my brain is like a sieve. Scrapbooking is usually the one time I forget the planning, I stop thinking and just go with the flow. I don't usually care if the pages go together, I like my pages to have character. When I'm making a book for someone else though I like to plan ahead so everything matches, most people find scrapbooks more aesthetically pleasing that way. 

Here's my process for gift books:

1) Find all my background pages and put them into the scrapbook in the page protectors in the exact order I want them to be. 2) Grab all the journal blocks and flat embellishments and split them up evenly throughout the book by placing them in page protectors.

3) Go through my stash and grab ribbon, stickers, coordinating papers, and other embellishments that match what I am working with. 4) Cut photo mats, for gifts I usually stick with 6.5 x 4.5 which works perfectly for 4 x 6 photos. TIP: When cutting photo mats always cut the larger measurement first, this gets you the most amount of mats possible from a single piece of paper. (you could also buy pre-cut mat stacks, the best are from DCWV because they are already made for 4 x 6 photos).

Once you have all that done you can whip your pages out pretty fast. I try to use the same format for each page so that it goes fast, looks good. The tricky part about making pages for other people's photos is that you will never know what colors will be in those photos and you want to have a finished product that will actually be used. There are a few ways that you can work around that, 1. you can use all black and white that way any colors will match the papers or 2. you can choose a theme that will most likely match the photos they are putting into it. This album is for christmas, so I am using black, white, red and green for the basic colors and I chose 1 paper stack (with all coordinating papers) to pull the rest of the album together. This way all the pages will look good together but it won't look to busy, no matter what photos people use.

A couple last tips:
- I always make sure to leave the journaling spaces flat. When I make my own albums I usually write my journaling and then pop it up with pop dots, it would make it more difficult for the recipients of the book to write their memories if the journaling wasn't flat on the page.
- Leaving a little bit of white space can't hurt, that way if there is memorabilia that go along with the pictures people can stick it there (ticket stubs, programs, whatever...)
- Cut a 4 x 6 piece of paper to put on your mats when gluing down elements that will go on your photo mats, this way you are sure that the recipient can get their photo under the element (see above the bracket, I only glued around where the photo will go so they can slide the side of the photo underneath)

is anyone making scrapbooks? Any tips to share?