Starter Scrapbooking Layout Ideas by jennifer Stanton

It's always difficult when you sit down hoping to create a really awesome scrapbook page but have no idea where to start. You've got your pictures. You've got your supplies. But your brain can't put it together or you're afraid to dive in. Don't worry, you're not alone. Here's a few ideas to get you started.

1. Choose a theme

If you don't already have your theme in mind, pick one now. Your theme can be very broad like Baby, Christmas, Wedding, or School Days. Or you can choose something more specific like Maggie's First Tooth, Maggie Learns to Walk, Charlie's New Bike, or Visiting Aunt Amy. Personally, I like the specific ones, but they usually are more difficult to find content for.

2. Choose some main embellishments

Your main embellishments should be related to your theme. If your theme is Baby, you might want little bottle stickers as your main embellishments. If your theme is Visiting Aunt Amy, you might want something that reminds you of Aunt Amy. My Aunt Amy loves sunflowers, so I would want my Visiting Aunt Amy scrapbook page to have some sunflowers. It's always good to have a place to start and a really good place to start is by getting some main embellishments.

3. Get coordinating paper and other embellishments

So now you have your main embellishments. From those, we can pick out good colors for our background color, accent colors, and other embellishments. My sunflowers are yellow and a soft brown color. Those two colors will be my accents. We just have to choose a main color. You might also want to consider what event is in the pictures you'll be displaying. In my case, it's a girls day, so it's safe to pick a light pink for my base color. If it had not been all girls in the picture, I might have went with a bright green.

4. Layout

Some people are born with this amazing ability to make beautiful layouts just by placing items at random on a page. I don't have that ability. I use a book of scrapbook sketches. They're just pencil drawings of layouts. In the book I use, there's 500 of these sketches. I just pick out a sketch and start cutting. It's that simple. If you don't have a scrapbook sketches book, I have some basic rules that might help you out.

1. Make the pictures the main idea.
2. Frame your pictures by cutting a piece of accent colored paper slightly bigger than the picture and putting it down under the picture.
3. Make room for some journaling to explain what was going on in the pictures.
4. Put your smallest embellishments on last. If you start with the smaller items, you might not have room for the bigger items when you get to them.

My name is Jennifer. I'm a programmer by profession, but my other skills include shopping, sewing, scrapbooking, photography, photo editing, custom framing, and other general crafting. I like to use ScrappingLayouts.com to help me make beautiful layouts. Visit my website at ScrapbookingLayoutIdeas.us for more scrapbooking layout ideas.

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