Bright colors brighten the day just like any smile will!

How to Make your ‘Scrapbook of Smiles’

• Take only photos of smiling faces. Any type of smile works. It can be a smirk, grin, mid laugh—any level of smile.
• Find a really brightly colored photo album or scrapbook – one able to hold all that cheer.
• Fill the album with all the biggest, toothiest grins.
• Decorate with smiley stickers, smiley backgrounds, and lots of happy embellishments.
• Make a note of what was making everyone smile in the scrapbook!

Every time you’re feeling down or just need to see a happy face you can go back to your ‘Scrapbook of Smiles.’ A smile can be all you need to brighten your day!

Here’s what you do:

• For a beach wedding, gather bits of sand to keep from the ceremony and find a nice wedding scrapbook.
• For this page, get blue or tan colored scrapbooking paper to decorate.
• Drip some liquid glue around the outside of the page to trace out a framed area, then fill in the area with a few dots.
• Spread the glue evenly and thinly, with something like a popsicle stick.
• Sprinkle the sand evenly across the page, then shake off any additional sand. Let the page dry.
• Do this with several pages.
• For some pages, try covering just the bottom half with sand only, to make the impression of a beach.

You’ll have textured, fun looking beach pages to go in your beach wedding scrapbook in no time. It’s so simple, a kid can do it! What’s your favorite part about decorating your own pages?

At the start of every summer you make the same promises, and the same goals. Now that we’re almost halfway through the summer, isn’t it time to start working on making those goals a reality?

Pull your pictures together and start making real strides. Start with these simple steps and you’ll be on your way to getting all of your photos albumed in no time!

How to Start:

• Head to the printers, now! The sooner you print those photos the better. Remember to pick them up too, don’t leave them behind.
• Stock up on photo albums and photo storage boxes to keep your photos, supplies and doubles nice and tidy. Being organized will keep you on track!
• If you have a dedicated space to leave your photos out, block off a few hours one or two days of the week to go back and work on your album. If you have no space, set aside a full day to break out all the photos and work. This way there’s less set up and clean up time.
• Above all else, have a goal! If you plan to give the album to someone, you’ll have more motivation to fill your photo album!

Check your summer scrapbook and album projects off your to-do list this month. This way you’ll be able to start new photo albums even sooner!

Many scrapbookers overlook the fun that’s had when you scrapbook with friends. Maybe you’re the “someone lonely” who needs a little cheer. You can make your day brighter by making a group scrapbooking effort.

Here’s how to start your scrapbooking efforts.

1. Find a common cause to scrapbook for. It can be a gift for someone, or maybe a fun day you both remember.
2. Pick a day. You don’t necessarily have to celebrate on July 11th just make sure to do it this month!
3. Get your scrapbooking supplies together. You can even pick out a new scrapbook to start a project together beforehand – even more fun!

Make your fun and cheerful scrapbook with someone looking for friendship this July. How else can you think to celebrate on “Cheer Up the Lonely Day?”

Take a page from decorating tips involving beautifully bound books – decorate with your beautiful fabric photo albums! You can use what’s hiding on your shelves to brighten dull areas of the house!

Rather than just filling and filing away those fine fabric photo albums, why not leave them out. You can add color to side tables and depth to your walls.

There’s a few ways to use photo albums as decorations:

Stack em! Pile up an assortment of colored albums on a side table. Pick albums of all the same size and stack up evenly against a wall, or spiral slightly in a stack in the center of the table.

Rack em! Mount single level bookshelves along the walls to hold your fabric photo album collection, regularly with binding facing out. Or feature a few select albums, like your fabric wedding photo album and first baby fabric photo album on a few shorter shelves. Place one photo album on each shelf with the cover facing outwards – giving you easy access to all of your most precious moments.

These are just a few of our favorite ways to show off fabric photo albums as part of your décor. There are a lot of other ways to use fabric photo albums in your design. Feel free to share with us your ideas below!

There are few things as fun for kids as gathering up a bunch of white clothing, dripping and dipping in rainbow colors and laying out in the sun to dry! It’s all part of immortalizing the colors of summer, and you can do the same in your scrapbooks!

While you’re waiting for the shirts to dry, have the kids help in making tie dye scrapbooking pages with the leftover dye.

What you need:

• Some form of dye, like from tie-dying (You don’t need to start off with tie-dying, it’s just more fun this way!)
• Plain scrapbooking pages
• Eye dropper or spray bottle (More than one is better!)
• An outdoors or covered area to work in.
• A fun and colorful scrapbook to put your pages in.

Fill the eye dropper or spray bottle with dye and color different sections of the scrapbooking paper. If you have multiple bottles, you can easily change out colors. Then leave it to dry, either flat or hanging alongside your spiffy new shirts!

These pages will be the perfect thing for you summer photo pages – or better yet as a background for all of your tie dying photos!

Celebrate summer fun with tie dying in your summer scrapbooks and photo albums! What else have you tried tie dying?

Last week we told you ways to use your sewing machine to make brilliant new scrapbooking page designs. Even if you don’t have a sewing machine – or lack the skills to use one – for this little holiday, you can bring stitching inspiration into your scrapbooking page for the day.

Get your stitch on to celebrate with some fun scrapbooking page designs. What you’ll need:

• Ribbon
• Scrapbooking paper
• Scissors
• Ruler

Faux stitch your pages together using evenly spaced cuts and ribbon. Take a ruler and mark out two holes for your ribbon to peak through, every one to two inches. Depending on the width of your ribbon, space the two holes out not more than twice the width of the ribbon. So for a ¼ inch ribbon, try ¾ gaps to show the ribbon and 1 inch gaps between each of those holes.

Run the ribbon through these holes, around your entire page or small sections. Try different ribbon types and thicknesses on the same page for a mismatched patchwork look!

Break out the big sewing machines! June 13^th is Sewing Machine Day – and the perfect occasion to pull out that old machine and make some really unique scrapbooking pages!

Blow the dust off that old sewing machine to make some small decorations to add to your scrapbooking pages.

• Make your own small and simple decorations! Cut out small circles, hearts and stars in fabric. Then sew along the edges. Try different sizes, and mixing and matching small shapes with slightly larger ones and layering them.
• Sew your paper pieces together. If you’re an old sewing machine pro, sew images and shapes on the paper inserts for your scrapbooking project, like flowers. Not so pro? Keep it simple by layering papers with a straight or boxed stitch. It’ll still look impressive, especially if you use different types, like those available on newer sewing machines.
• Forget the glue; sew your photos into pages. Make paper frames or cut out designs to frame your photos in a fun and different way.

Don’t have a sewing machine? Check back in next week for ways to celebrate Sewing Machine Day without a machine!

The Studious Scrapbooker

You’re the kind who scrapbooks your photos the ones that other people give you. You might be called the family scrapbooker. Everyone sends you their photos to print and add to the family scrapbook! You take lots of time and care to decorate each and every page.

The Unfinished Scrapbooker

You take photos faster than you can scrapbook. Sometimes it’s a love of photography, or you just have so many things to take photos of. (Parents of young kids, you know what it’s like!) You’ll just be happy for a big  photo album to throw photos into.

It’s no fun when you start out a Studious Scrapbooker and gradually become the Unfinished Scrapbooker. You can try to balance the time for scrapbooking by becoming a Happy Medium Scrapbooker.

The Happy Medium Scrapbooker

A jumbo scrapbook with memo pages, but more room for photos will be just the thing for you. When there’s no time to decorate pages, you can still add that special touch. Set aside time for just one scrapbook a year, possibly a travel scrapbook for all your family trips. (Maybe those summer ones coming up?)

A happy scrapbooker is one with lots of photos, albums and time! How do you balance out the time to scrapbook and time to take photos?

The sky is blue, the grass is green, and dirt is brown! There are lots of ways to learn about colors with kids, and you can make it even more fun by making a colorific scrapbook with your kids.

What’s a Colorific Scrapbook?

Assign one color of the rainbow to each page in the scrapbook. Each scrapbooking page can be a burst of red or green, with all matching photos and decorations. You can even have multiple pages of colors – ei. vivid and pale reds! It’s both educational and fun!

What you’ll need:

• A digital camera
• A scrapbook
• Colored scrapbooking pages
• Colored scrapbooking supplies

Let the kids take photos around the house or give them all week to find all the colors of the rainbow. Encourage them to look for color in the details. They might find green in the peas at the dinner table and orange in the sunset. Challenge older kids to take photos only in the kitchen or in nature. Match the photo to the page, and decorate with one color to make your colorific scrapbook.

Rather than just learning the colors, apply the concepts in a fun activity and make a colorful scrapbook your kids can hold onto for years!