You don't have to use every picture. This took me a while to learn! I use to say to myself, "if I don't put them in a book, what else am I going to do with them?" Well, like I said a few newsletters ago. Create different places for different pictures. Have a special Heirloom scrapbook for your very special photos, and have a photo album to keep the rest. (Photo album with clear slots to slide photos in.) Forget the boxes! Boxes just store pictures that you can't ever see or flip through easily!
I use to try to fit as many pictures on a page thinking I would save money and time. Before I believed in having different scrapbooks for different pictures, I would try to cram as many pictures I could on a page. I would cut my pictures up into shapes of all kinds. This was partly a trend at that time, but I look back and feel like I was loosing focus on the reason I was doing the scrapbook. The reason was to display the pictures! I now use basic shapes instead of cutting my picture into a sun or teddy bear, I will "crop it" into a basic shape. "Crop it," means to get rid of the dead space of the picture and zero in on what the picture is mostly about. I will also use a basic circle to add a little variety. I will also enlarge extra special pictures instead of having many similar pictures on a page. Once in a while I will cut out a person or thing for variety. It just depends on the picture.
I use to just put pictures on a page and write some journaling under the picture. I have found that it looks better when the journaling has its own space. I created a Winnie the Pooh paper piecing for my daughter; I then created a honey pot to write the journaling on. I feel like it looks better to have a place to journal. I will make a basic rectangle shape in order to hold the journaling as well. Some people shy away from their own handwriting because they don't like how it looks, and I admit I have done this. My grandmother always gave us a book for our birthdays and wrote a little note to us inside the cover. When my grandmother passed away, I opened up one of my favorite childhood books that she gave me, and it was so neat to see her handwriting inside. Ever since then, I have hand written a lot of my journaling because how I write is part of the history of me. Journaling is an essential part of scrapbooking: take time to document the event!
