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15 Fresh and Fun Scrapbooking Ideas for Your Next Project

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Before your memories fade, consider gathering your pictures into a unique book where they will last for generations. Not only will they last, but they will also tell a creative story in more than photos.

Scrapbooking relays the story of your life in pictures, but there are also great ways to embellish the photos with art and scrapbooking supplies to help the pictures pop off the page.

Here are 15 Fresh and Fun Scrapbooking Ideas for Your Next Project:

  1. Stamps

Invest in a good quality stamp kit. Choose one that has stamps for every holiday and season. You will want to purchase ink pads separately, so you get the colors you really like.

Stamps on the pages of your scrapbook are easy and add a fun dimension to what is in the picture. Fishing trips, the first day of school, home from the hospital, each of these deserve their own page in a scrapbook, and having the perfect stamp to go on the page is priceless.

  1. Watercolors

Even if you don’t paint, using watercolors to highlight a photo or paint a few stripes, zigzags, and/or spots on the side of the page, will help to make the photo come alive.

  1. Ribbons

Look in your sewing stash for different colors, textures, and lengths of ribbon. You can create a background of different ribbons, you can braid them or overlap the ribbon for a variety of effects.

Create flowers out of ribbon, although they should be small to be able to close the book or you can decorate the outside of the scrapbook with small clusters of ribbon flowers.

  1. Patterns

Look around your home for things with patterns. The kitchen probably has several different items that contain repeating patterns that can be duplicated on the page. Take a strainer and enlarge the pattern of holes so you can place several different pictures in them.

Some patterns make sense, while others seem to have no rhythm or reason. These are the best kind to put photos in.

  1. Glue

Use different colors of glue in your glue gun or bottle. There are many colors available in glue and they don’t have to be regulated to the back of a photo. Create swirls and other designs with glitter and colorful glues.

  1. Shapes

Again, look around your home for different shapes you can outline on the paper and then put a photo inside. Use the standard circle, square, triangle, but find a Hexagon, Trapezoid, a Rhombus (a diamond) and anything that would highlight a picture well on the page.

  1. Backgrounds

No need to spend lots of money on fancy paper. Use the fancy paper for the fancy photos, but use everyday household items for your backgrounds.

Use a bunch of recipe cards from a family book to make a background for a photo of the kids making cookies. Use a newspaper as the background for the day someone was born or passed away. Use an old map as your travel pages and outline in a bright color the path you took to get to your destination.

Old takeout menus are another great background for travel pages or cooking pages.

  1. Fabric

You probably have a drawer full of small scraps of different fabric. Take them out and match them to different photos. The fabric doesn’t have to match the picture, and it doesn’t have to be big or smooth. The fabric will give your page texture.

  1. Use Black and White

Have a page or two of black and white photos and designs. Use a black and white checkered pattern behind a photo of your dog in a field or kids playing board games. There are so many options when it comes to black and white, where less is always more.

  1. Envelopes or Pockets

Use pockets or envelopes to keep small mementoes inside. Baby’s first missing tooth or haircut. These are things that are important and shouldn’t be lost in a drawer. Use clear plastic to create the envelope so the item becomes part of the page.

  1. Pressed Flowers

When someone takes the time to pick or send you flowers, you want to save one or two as a lasting memory. Press flowers in larger books for a few days before adding them to scrapbook pages. You could also place a flower inside a clear pocket so it will not get damaged.

  1. Thread

Sew directly on the paper. You may have to purchase a thicker card stock paper but treat it like an embroidery project and outline whatever design you can come up with. Use thread, yard or funky shoelaces.

Use an old coloring book with different animals or items as a template for sewing on the page.

  1. Old Books

Use old books and puzzle books to create a unique background for different pictures.

  1. Trace Puzzle Pieces

Break out an old puzzle or pick one up at the thrift store. There are bound to be so many different shapes that can be traced on the paper and then cut small photos to put in them.

You can also glue pictures directly to several connected puzzle pieces, then slice them apart and glue them into the book, either as one piece or with some distance between the pieces.

  1. Paw Prints

When creating a page about your dog or cat, take a non-toxic ink pad and press their paw on it. Immediately place the paw on the paper for a lasting memory next to a photo of the animal having fun.

The same can be done with hand and foot prints of babies and children. Be sure to use non-toxic ink and paints.

Many websites, like Pinterest, will give you more idea on what to use when creating a beautiful and unique scrapbook. Memories in a scrapbook are great gifts for your entire family. They also make wonderful wedding presents as you can chronicle the evolution of the happy couple’s journey to each other at the end of the isle.

Magic Moments – Here’s How to Keep Your Digital Memories Safe

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There’s a lot to love about digital photography; it’s instant, it’s sharable and there’s no need for piles of hefty family photo albums gathering dust in the closet. But those photo albums were a great way to keep memories safe. In the good old days, once photos were developed and tucked securely into a photo album – barring fire, flood or apocalypse – they were literally safe as houses.

Not so with today’s digital images. Experts estimate that one third of us have lost images for one reason or another. When you snap images on a phone, your phone can auto upload them to the cloud, but safeguarding images taken with a standalone digital camera needs a little more work.

Regularly Transfer Images to Other Devices

Digital cameras can hold thousands of images but all of those wonderful pictures could be gone for good if you lose your camera or memory card before you get around to transferring the images to another device.

Get into the habit of loading the images onto your computer at home so that they aren’t languishing on your memory card.

If your camera has Bluetooth, transferring your images is child’s play; just maintain a connection between your camera and computer or tablet, and your image files will automatically transfer themselves.

Embrace the Cloud

A good cloud storage service is essential. When you use the cloud to back up your images and video files, they’ll always be safe and you can access them on any device.

For the utmost security, the cloud service that you choose should be a market leader. So many apps these days offer some amount of free cloud storage space but there’s no guarantee that these companies will still be around in 6 months, never mind 6 years, so stick with safe options like Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, Microsoft One Drive and Drop Box.

All of these providers give you plenty of free storage -15GB in the case of Google Drive – and for a small fee you can purchase more if you need it.

Broken Laptop? Don’t Panic!

Don’t despair if you have images saved on a computer hard drive and your machine bites the dust. Computers and laptops regularly fail, but the data on the hard drive is often perfectly fine, you just have to access it.

If you fancy taking a screwdriver to your desktop or laptop computer, you can liberate your hard drive and hook it up to another computer. This is simple to do on a desktop computer, just release the screws on the case, slide the side panel off, then unplug the drive.

Laptops take a little more work, and the best idea is to use another device to view a YouTube video showing you how to go about it for your model.

Sometimes, though, the data on the hard drive is corrupted or overwritten. Fixing this kind of problem is beyond the capabilities of most of us, so in this case you need to hand your drive over to experts like the secure data recovery professionals at Secure Data Recovery who will retrieve all of your irreplaceable images for you.

This type of service can even help when memory sticks and flash drives get corrupted.

Taking a few minutes every week to manage your digital images will keep them safe and sound and ready to be viewed whenever you feel like taking a trip down memory lane. And even if disaster does strike there’s a very good chance that a professional can recover your cherished images.

Ways in which You Can Earn From Your Love of Photography

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It’s always nice to make money doing something that you love and if photography is your passion then there are lots of ways in which you can make a little cash on the side or even a career from your photography skills. Turning your hobby into a way of earning will mean that you have to work hard and really perfect your skills, you will also need to be professional and try to get hold of the finest equipment possible. Providing you can take great photographs like Radha Singh NJ resident and friend of mine who works professionally as a photographer, then you could make some nice earnings and here is how.

Take Great Shots

The key to making money through photography will obviously rely on the fact that you have a high skill level. The better shots that you can take, the more money you are likely to earn. In order to gain a reputation then you will also need to be able to add something a little different to your photography, a calling card so to speak.

Enter Competitions

There are regular competitions held in magazines and websites which offer cash prizes for the best photographs. If you have taken  shot that you are particularly proud of and think that it could win then enter as many competitions as you can. Competitions are usually held around a particular them such as nature, action, sport etc. If you think that you have snapped a winner and it falls into the right category then you could stand to win some cash.

Work Weddings and Events

Wedding photography might not be the most fun way to take photos but it can earn you a very healthy income. Couples play an awful lot of money for photographers to capture their happy day and  as most weddings take place on a weekend, you could turn wedding photography in to a great weekend earner whilst you pass the rest of your week taking the shots that you want.  Contact event companies and offer your services, they will be able to approach whoever is putting an event on and suggest your name. Snapping events can be a lot of fun and gain you exclusive access to exciting events.

Work With Schools and Colleges

Another good side earner which you could look at is to contact schools and colleges and offer your services for professional shots. Year books and class photos are taken every year and if you can make some good contacts then you could make great money each year from working with schools and colleges, capturing the students and teachers. You will need to be able to develop a large amount of prints if you work with schools and you should ensure that you have the capability and tools to be able to do this.

The key to gaining a reputation as a photographer is to take great shots of high quality, be likable and more importantly be prompt with your prints.

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We left our home in Sydney, Australia many moons ago in May 2012 and, other than a brief stint back in Perth for Christmas and a wedding in early 2014, we have been travelling the world nomadically ever since, running a business from our laptops and we’re here to show you how to do it!