Supplies


These are some of the supplies I like to use and would definitely recommend. The Photographs The pictures are the stars of your book no matter what. If it weren’t for these pictures there would be no book. I recommend having all the photos you plan to include and separate them out into groups based on the pages you want to create. That way you can see how many pictures you have for a certain event and plan how many pages you will make for that event. The printing of the pictures is one of the most costly parts depending on how many images you’re going to include. I like to use HP’s Snapfish site. You can either buy prints as you go for $0.25 a picture or purchase pre-paid prints in increments of 250. This is the option I chose so the cost of each print was only $0.08. This is a much better value than printing them yourself at home or at the grocery store. Also, Snapfish offers photo editing tools like cropping an image so you get a nicer looking picture.
The Book The book is one area that I do not recommend scrimping on. There are tons of options out there. You can get books with designs on them, books with picture holes cut out, different types of cover material, sizes and different bindings. I personally like the 12 X 12 black leather bound albums. I always get an expandable one that you can buy extra pages for. The extra page packages come with post extenders that you screw into the albums binding to expand it. Depending on how large you think the book could get, make sure you buy one that a large amount of binding cover to make sure the spine doesn’t become exposed.
Paper I buy an entire rainbow worth of 8 ½ X 11 construction paper. I don’t recommend the books of paper that give you a sampling. I buy each color individually. Make sure you get good looking paper that doesn’t already look faded. I recommend using construction paper for everything except for the physical page itself. Mainly because it’s cheaper and thinner so when you start layering the page doesn’t get too thick. For the pages themselves buy the 12 X 12 quality cardstock. They are sturdy, well made, and react well with liquids like glue. Every store that carries scrapbooking material will have a huge selection of printed paper. I’m not a huge fan of using those as the main page. Mainly b/c they’re flimsy, the overwhelming patterns or pictures can be distracting from your photos, and they cause your pages to have a flat look. I do however like to use them for matting pictures or to cut apart and use in smaller doses such as decoration. Example. Not all of the printed paper is bad. Every once in a while you’ll find a design that can work well as the main page. Example. But watch out because they’re usually slightly smaller than the cardstock. I also recommend buying a storage container with drawers to store the paper. It's very helpful to keep full size pages seperate from scrap pages as well as the construction paper.

Glue I am a huge rubber cement fan. It is photo safe and acid free and offers many advantages over other types of glue or photo tabs. The thing I like most about rubber cement is that it is not permanent. If you glue a picture down and decide later that you don’t like it there you can peel it off without damaging the picture or the paper. Any messes you make with excess glue disappears easily either by rubbing it off or using a rubber cement remover square. It makes it much easier to make a book b/c you don’t have the stress of if I glue this down there’s no going back. Also if years from now I want to scan in a picture it’s easy to remove the one picture as opposed to juggling the entire book. Rubber cement can be messy but it’s definitely my preferred form of adhesive.
Extras Other supplies I recommend purchasing is the Paper Studio Alphabet Punch Set. It comes with both upper and lower case letters. They are very easy to use and dont' begin to hurt your hands after a while. They punch out very nice crisp letters that are great to use for sub-headings in a vacation layout or for other attention grabbing headlines. They can also substitute for regular headings if you have a picture full page and not a lot of time to draw and cut out letters from scratch. Example The crazy edged sissors are also a great buy to help add a bit of a flare to paper you use to frame pictures. They will also help you save a lot of time!
© Lauren Merka \| All pages are original material.