Layout Ideas

These represent some of the pages I used in a Scrapbook as a gift to friends in celebration of our last 20 years of friendship. It was difficult to sort through 20 years of photos and choose my favorites. I tried to get everyone represented and include only the good memories. Some of the dates were difficult to pin down but the book was a joy to complete.

Mosaic Pages
We have been going to the beach for 20 years so we have lots of pictures of sand and water. Many of them were not good enough for the family photo album but I couldn't bear to throw them away so they were used to create both the water mosaic and the sand mosaic pages. I started with a pile of photos with sand or water in the background and made 1 inch squares of either the sand or the water. The sand tiles were filed on one envelope and the water tiles in another. When I had enough I arranged, and then glued them as the background. I also had enough for a horizon at the top of the page with sky and sea gulls. For the water page I made a simple boat template. Two triangles for the sails, a smaller triangle flag, and a flat base. I then cut out the photos and matted them with a contrasting color to make them pop off the page. For the sand picture I used a clip art sand castle to partially frame the group photo.

A Woven Basket
Easter Egg hunts were a big part of our children's Easter celebration. To make a page of Easter eggs I started with a basket woven of two colors of tan paper. I glued them together on the back and then cut out a basket shape. I then added a handle, and Easter grass with green paper both peeking out of the basket and growing on the bottom of the page. The Eggs were cut from an oval template and used to make the pictures pop from the page. The butterfly was clip art I printed and cut out.

Birthdays
Parties and Balloons seem to go hand in hand so I used an oval with a small triangle at the bottom to represent balloons for the mats around the photos. The streamers were additional pieces of paper cut out with a purple party hat added for fun.

Beach Boys
This was perhaps my favorite page to do. The background was a blue page with torn paper added in strips to represent the water and the sand. The torn white paper clouds with a few gulls drawn in were all that was needed for a background for these two special guys.

Bubbles
I had a photo of Carrie blowing bubbles which seemed to be a great start for all the little photo 'bubbles' that float off the page. The background was a purchased piece of bubble paper.

Picnics
For dozens of years we have attended an annual Picnic (fund raiser) for the local Philharmonic. The background for this page is a piece of blown up clip art music. I scanned a program and shrank it in the upper right hand corner and journaled snippets of memories on the left column.

Halloween
I used a pumpkin shape as the background for these photos. I cut the photos to fit within the curves of the shape and added a stem and leaf.

Christmas Traditions
For this I used two pages - a left and a right as mirror images of the tree halves making a whole Christmas Tree. I used a circle template for the photo ornaments and cut square packages for under the tree for the photos that were too large to be ornaments. I even found some bows to add on the packages from Christmas Cards. Since scanning these images I have added titles Christmas on the left page and Traditions on the right page.

Critters
Over the years animals have shared many of our memories. I made a Critter page as a way to journal many of them. Print Master has a program to place fonts into various shapes which is how I made the title, the clip art also came from Print Master. I then drew a pencil spiral to list the animal memories we had. On the next page (not pictured here) I added many animal photos we had collected over the years.

Cover
The book I bought came with a protective plastic cover which I used as a template to cut out a piece of watercolor paper. I painted it with layers of blues, greens and a tiny bit of red in places. I added veins of gold and bronze. I used a piece of the paper for the title and layered that on a piece of gold paper. I allowed extra paper for multiple attempts at the title and chose my favorite.

Camping
We have camped for many years and to make this picture I golded some green card stock as a basic tent shape.

Journeling
It was difficult to add journaling to 20 years of memories. I printed on the computer a table of contents for the scrapbook and added generalized journaling there. I added dates and names to as many of the photographs as I could. Oh how I wish I had written the dates on the back of the photographs. Our table of contents included:
20 Years of Memories

Babies
The Greenbrier
Easter Egg Hunts
Birthdays
Food
Many Years of Camping
Critters
Sand
So Many Sunsets
Toys
Bubbles
The Beach Boys
Through the Years with Classic Swimwear
Boats
Water
The Road Trips
Picnics With the Pops
School
Halloween
Christmas Traditions
The End of the album but not of our Memories