Scrapbooking with your handcraft skills

Scrapbooking is a hobby with a real purpose and benefits. A hobby admired by your friends and family but admired mostly by yourself for such an accomplishment.

The memories therein will be secured for generations to come as you secure precious photos by a method where your creativity has been displayed in full.

Traditional scrapbooking brings beautiful results working with numerous sheets of colored papers. This method of collating printed matter to create your page in a scrapbook does not however give you the opportunity to use your skills with needlework, knitting, crochet, painting etc.

Turn your next scrapbook into a coffee table showpiece with a difference!

Taking the photo of your choice to scrapbook, reflect on that moment in time and note all the colors and items related. You will be surprised how many items you can list.

For example in the photo of a child you can note items such as a jumper, dress, hair ribbons, toys, a hat, and many more.

All these items can be reproduced in miniature by using your handwork skills.

With this method of scrapbooking you will be more absorbed in creating ‘the moment’. In fact you will feel somewhat sentimental about the baby jacket you once crocheted for example. This is when your work becomes very personalized.

There comes that time in ones life when you think of that ‘something special’ you can make to hand on through the generations and this style of scrapbook is such an item.

Think of this project as a book displaying your handwork therefore making a ‘fabric story book’.

I made one of these books to be handed on to each of my two children for them to cherish and always be reminded of the ‘special’ times our family spent together.

My grandmother crocheted a small blanket for each of her grandchildren for ‘keepsake’ and so loved by all but a ‘special’ scrapbook consisting of your handwork throughout will touch heartstrings. Nothing bought over a shop counter can compare with a gift made from mums loving hands!

The direction your story pages take depends greatly on the content of your photos. I focused more on this factor than quality as old or damaged photos can be restored in photographic labs. I always make it a practice to make a copy of every old original photo just in case one gets damaged in the process of creating a scrapbook page.

This is not important if your photos were taken over the years of the digital camera but for people in my age group total reliance was on the use of film so without having kept the negatives we had no backup.

Instead of using glue on photos I often use different types of pins or photo corners to attach original photos. This way I can always detach the photo should I need to reproduce it a second time.

When needing a frame for a photo use your imagination by either sewing one using lace and adding pearls to beautify for example, but the ideas are numerous. This way you can slip a photo in without having to completely secure.

In my next hub i will be going into more detail on how i created some of my favorite pages.