Scrapbooking those cute little smiles

I had some time to sit down and be creative today.  Yeah!  The good days are the days I get to create!  Unfortunately some days are a little easier than others.  It took me a while to get this page to my satisfaction but I like the final result.

It’s hard to see in this picture, but the cushion on my sons seat is a tan and brown plaid.  Because of that, I pulled the white and brown plaid paper from the Parisian Breeze Specialty DSP to use on this page.  The strip at the top and the box in the lower right-hand corner use this DSP.

The large scallop circle you see was made on the Big Shot with the Scallop Circle Die and then I used the Crop-A-Dile to punch holes in each of the scallops.  The Stampin’ Up! Scallop Circle Punch was used to make the scallops in the lower left corner.  Those scallops have jumbo eyelets in the center of them.

Scrapbooking is so much fun.  It’s fun to take pictures and find a way to put them together that is appealing to the eyes.  Sometimes I think I have my own style with scrapbooking but that’s a good thing.  If every page or every book looked the same then scrapbooking would be pointless, we might as well just stick the pictures in a regular picture book.  Scrapbooking is supposed to highlight the pictures and bring them together in a fun way.

I’m certainly not the world’s authority on scrapbooking but I thought I’d take a couple minutes to give a few pointers for making good scrapbook pages, or at least a few things for you to think about:

• Colors – try to pull colors from your pictures to use in the scrapbook page (of course that’s assuming you have the pictures picked before creating the page.)
• It is okay to occasionally cut off body parts when you’re croping!  You do not always need to see a persons whole body!!  If we see a shoulder we’ll just naturally know there’s an arm attached – we don’t have to see it to assume it.
• Are there any elements in your pictures that you can bring into the page design?  For example, in the page above I pulled the tan/brown plaid and used DSP with a similar design in the page.  This works to pull everything together.
• Put the focus on the pictures.  It’s fun to have lots of cutesy things on our pages, however, don’t overdue.  You really don’t want someone to look at your page and focus so much on the cutesy decorations that they suddenly notice a picture of junior and wonder why you’d throw it into the page. 
• One last thing to think on for now, use a digital camera.  With a digital camera you’re free to take lots of pictures and then you can decide which you will use and which to print. 

I hope these tips have been of some help.  Are there other things you’d like to have my opinion about (I won’t say “that you’d like to know about” because really I’m not an expert, just giving my opinion)?  Were these helpful?  Leave me a comment and let me know how I can help you the most!