Lots of people have favorite winter hobbies like skiing, tubing, or snowboarding. I’m not much of a snowbunny and don’t really like the cold. I do love outdoor sports but prefer the weather to be milder. So scrapbooking is the perfect winter hobby for me. I love reliving old memories while going through my pictures. Sometimes I work on old family photos. But more often I spend my time making pages for my grandchildren’s scrapbooks.
Every year each of my grandchildren receives a birthday scrapbook from me of the previous year. Because all of our grandchildren live nearby, I always have plenty of photos. The hardest part is choosing which photos to use. I usually arrange my scrapbook pages in chronological order but sometimes there are theme pages in the mix.
Christmas, Easter, and each child’s birthday usually need two-page layouts. Sometimes it also works out to make two-page layouts for each month. Scrapbooks are a great way to preserve your history and that of your family.
Some scrappers use a lot of embellishments on each page with a single photo or two. My pages are the opposite: a lot of photos with a little embellishment. Sometimes I use all 4×6 photos but other times I use collage prints to allow more photos on each page. I crop the collage prints to individual photos which are either half size or quarter size.
In addition to my grandkids’ scrapbooks, I’m always working on my grown kids’ scrapbooks. They are all works in progress although each of them has at least one scrapbook of their earliest years.
One of my favorite scrapbook projects resulted in forming my own small business making scrapbooks for other people. For my Mom’s 85th birthday, I gathered up old and new pictures from everyone in the family to make her two big scrapbooks of her whole life.
My aunts contributed copies of pictures from Mom’s childhood. All of my siblings added photos of their families. Mom was so excited when she saw all of the pictures in the scrapbooks. There were over 300 pages and at least a couple of thousand photos.
Since that time, I’ve made scrapbooks for myself, some of my siblings, other family members, and for friends and customers. Most of the photos I’ve shared are from my big scrapbook that I call The Story of Us. Scrapbooking is a great way to relive the magic moments of your life.