Bruce the Chef

By: Tom Ambrozewicz

You don’t have to spend hours every day creating painstakingly perfect
pages, but scrapbooking does take a certain amount of time and care.
Don’t despair if you’re already busy with your family and job-there are
ways to make beautiful albums that don’t require as much of a time
commitment as traditional scrapbooking. By learning some alternative
options, even the busiest person will be able to scrapbook in the few
spare minutes of the day.

The first step to quickly designing pages is organizing your tools and
photographs. Take an afternoon to sort through your supplies and throw
out anything that is unusable or unwanted. These items might be good
candidates for things to use when scrapbooking with kids. Sort your
tools by use-cutters should be placed in one spot, while adhesives
should have a place of their own. Sort your papers as well, either by
color, type, or design. This way, you’ll be able to easily grab the
paper you need instead of searching throw unorganized piles. Also, take
a few minutes when you get a set of prints to categorize them or even
group them into sets of three or four to put together on a page.

You can create a very simple and quick kind of album without much work
simply by using a solid colored background and matting your photos
uncropped. This option looks similar to the photo albums you can buy at
the store, but your photographs will be safe on acid free paper and you
have room for journaling. You can also create a brightly-colored and
more pleasing album this way for not much more time than it would take
you to slide your pictures into the slots of regular albums. This way,
you can also add more embellishments if you have time later on and want
to get more creative.

If you want that traditional scrapbook look however, pages can still be
created in a short time. Many kits are available in craft stores to
create ready-made pages. These kits come with all the elements of a
completed page, so all you have to do is cut your pictures to size and
glue everything together. For a more inexpensive option, look for
papers that are conducive to quick layouts. These pages will not need
much embellishment, so again you just need to cut your pictures to size
and stick them to the page. A step beyond this is to create pages by
yourself by using other people’s designs. The Internet, scrapbooking
magazines, craft books, and friends are all good sources for ideas.
This way the planning is done for you and you don’t have to make color
decisions; it is just a process of mimicking what you see.

Once you have mastered the art of quick scrapbooking, you might find
you have time now and then to sit down and design new pages from
scratch. Pre-made layouts will help get your creative juices flowing,
so in no time you’ll learn that creating your own designs does not have
to take long either.

About the Author:

Tom Ambrozewicz is one of the pioneers in using breakthrough audio technology on his web sites. You can read, you can listen to professional narrator reading to you or having MP3 files ready to download if you hate to keep printed files. You can check all scrapbooking tips at Ask-How.info now.

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