Top 5 Inexpensive Scrapbooking Ideas

Scrapbooking is a very enjoyable hobby that allows you to be as creative as you want to be while also organizing bits and pieces of your life for you and your loved ones to enjoy.  Many people, however, find that it is easy to get caught up with scrapbooking and end up spending large amounts of money for materials.

One of the most effective ways to save up on scrapbooking is to live by its name.  When you create pages, do not be shy to use scraps and other recyclable and reusable materials in a creative manner.  You can still have beautiful pages, even if you do not spend too much on commercial scrapbooking materials.

Here are the top 5 ways to use your creativity in creating innovative, inexpensive, and yes, beautiful scrapbook pages.

1. Make your mark!

If you have a scrapbook for your baby, you could use non-toxic coloring material and spread it on his or her feet and hands.  Carefully imprint these on your scrapbook pages.  You can fill one page with hand prints, and the next with foot prints.  You can mix hand and foot prints in one page.  You could also use hand and foot prints as a theme: “Watch my baby grow!” where each page of your scrapbook features hand and foot prints made at the time it was made; recording your baby’s growth over the months.

Hand and foot prints are also great for other kinds of scrapbooks.  If you are making a collaborative scrapbook with your family or friends, you can ask the creator of the page to “sign” the page with his or her hand or foot prints.

2. Go back to nature.

Leaves, flowers, stems.  You can go to your garden and pick up some leaves or flowers, especially those with great fragrances, intriguing shapes, or nice colors.  These make great and lovely borders for your scrapbook pages.  Just make sure to press them first before putting them up on your scrapbook to avoid stains.

3. Summer fun!

If you want to preserve your memories from the beach, you can pick up seashells, multi-colored pebbles, and yes even sand and paste them on your scrapbook pages.  After drying them out in the sun, you can squeeze glue on your pages according to the shape you want and sprinkle sand on it.  You can also color the sand by using chalk.

Beaches also have a lot of multi-colored stones, making it a natural way to add some color to your page.

4. Remember the gifts.

If you are working on your wedding scrapbook, you could make use of the gift wrappers used for the wedding presents you got.  Not only do these wrapping papers make the perfect backgrounds with their intricate, classy and elegant wedding themes and designs, they also add some significance and sentimentality to the page!  More than this, you could probably reuse the gift ribbons too for lovely borders or page section separators.  And the gift tags also make perfect page accents.

Do not stop at gift wrappers.  If you have been on some road trip, you can use maps for backdrops, or pages from the travel brochure you got your ideas from.  Coming from a concert, you might want to save the tickets and the promotional items.

5. Don’t throw out old stuff!

You just elbowed a vase from your night stand?  Check it out to see if there are some ceramic flowers and some other intricate designs that you could use for your scrapbook.

Your iPod headphone just conked out?  You could probably add it as an accent on a music-related scrapbook page you are working on.

Everyday things literally take on a different purpose once you look at it creatively.  Aside from these, you can also cut out some old magazines for your lettering, or create odd shapes out of old boxes.  The possibilities are endless.

Scrapbooking should let you exercise your creativity to the fullest.  Remember that these are pages featuring different works of art that showcase moments of your life.  While it is okay to look at what others have done to get some design ideas, try to be as innovative and original as you can.  Remember that your scrapbook is a testament to your life, having real bits and pieces of your life show up on your pages could make a nostalgia day even more enjoyable!