Carolina Beach Layout

Here's a layout I did several years ago.  It love how the paper colors were perfect for my beach pictures.

Pet Pages

Pet pages are fun to make. Before I became a mom, most of my scrapbooks were filled with pages of my cats.

Even now I still scrapbook pages of my cats, just not as many. Kids love looking at pages of their pets. So if you have pets, be sure to include them in your scrapbooks. After all, they are part of the family too.

Pet Albums

Having an entire scrapbook dedicated to a favorite pet is a super idea, especially for kids.  I'm constantly taking pictures of my pet cats.  I have an entire album made of my cat Amber.  There are pictures of her in the album from when she was a kitten all the way to the end of her life 10 years later.  At first, Amber's album was done by traditional scrapbooking.  Later, I made some digital pages using her pictures.  After she died, my son was so upset that he wanted some pictures of her in his room.  Having that album of her helped too.  He constantly looked through her album over the next few weeks.  It seemed like all those pictures I had of her helped him through his grieving process.  Now we enjoy looking back through her album remembering all the fun times we had with her.

Now I am working on an album for our other cat, Jasmine.  Jasmine's album is being done entirely through digital scrapbooking.  I have become addicted to digital scrapbooking now.  It's so much easier to do, and I can get so many more pages done at a time this way. 

Mother/Child Questionnaire

Here's a fun idea for a scrapbook page.  Create a mother/child (or father/child) questionnaire.  Think of five questions you could ask your child about you, and you answer the same five questions about your child.  It's so much fun to see how your child answers your questions at different ages.  Also, your child will love seeing your answers about them.  After you have each question answered, include it on a scrapbook page with pictures of you and your child.

I did a page with questions for my son and me.  Here are the five questions I asked:

Questions for child:
1. What is your mom's favorite thing to do?
2. What is your mom's favorite thing to eat?
3. Where is your mom's favorite place to go?
4. Name one thing you like about your mom?
5. What is your favorite thing to do with your mom?

Questions for mom:
1. What is Dylan's favorite thing to do?
2. What is Dylan's favorite thing to eat?
3. Where is Dylan's favorite place to go?
4. Name one thing you like about Dylan?
5. What is your favorite thing to do with Dylan?

Here is my completed scrapbook page:

Using Favorite Quotes in Scrapbooks

I keep a collection of my favorite quotes. They are nice to read on days when I need encouragement or inspiration. A great idea would be to use a favorite quote as the central idea for a scrapbook page. After you pick the quote you want to use, then find pictures that go well with that quote.  Here are a few pages I've done with quotes.

  

A page with a quote and some pictures would make a great title page to an album.  This one is the title page for a Christmas album.

Albums by Theme

I like to create themed albums instead of albums by year. For example, I have one album I use as my Christmas album. I started with pictures from 2009. I create several pages for each year. I create a new title page, or chapter for the start of each year. I keep adding pages for several years until the album is full. That way, I can look through one album and see the memories of several Christmases, and see how much the kids have changed over the years.

organizing digital photos tip

Organizing photos:

To organize digital photos on your computer, make a folder and label it by year. Inside the year folder, make a folder for each month.  Place all photos as you take them in the current months folder. If you keep this up during the year, it will be much easier than having to weed through a mass of photos trying to figure out what year and month they were taken.