3 Great Scrapbooking Templates - How To Use Them To Emphasize Your Theme

When you're creating a scrapbook, you'll want to use a scrapbooking template that reflects your overall theme. If you're not sure what theme to apply, then here are some ideas that may help you find a ready-made scrapbooking template or create your own.

1. Environmental

Environmental themes are very popular these days. Scrapbooking templates with an environmental theme include natural motifs incorporating plants, animals, and the basic elements - soil, water, and air. They portray the natural beauty of our planet and are perfect when your photos and memorabilia are related to outdoor and environment-related activities. Perfect embellishments for your environmental scrapbooking template could include that small pebble you found at the beach, a dried leaf or twig, or an Earth Day button or decal. This template is a perfect to present your nature trips, safaris, hiking and camping adventures, and wildly successful fishing trips.

2. Technological

Using a technological scrapbooking template are a great way to illustrate the passage of time and how much things have changed. They incorporate images and memorabilia related to any number of technologies - computers, cell phones, microchips, vehicles, space travel, and gadgets. A scrapbook with a technological scrapbooking template is perfect for that techno-geek in the family. It can document his or her evolution through different stages of techno-geekness. Or you can use the technological theme to showcase the houses you've lived in, moving up from a black-and-white portable television to a giant plasma wall-mounted screen. Your technological scrapbooking template will prove how tech-savvy you are and make your friends envy your modern attitude.

3. Athletic

One of the most popular scrapbooking templates reflects sports and fitness. Often selected to document a man's life, it makes a masculine scrapbook free of ribbons and lace. Most sports-oriented scrapbooking templates reflect one of three elements:

Persona - A very popular scrapbooking template, this type of template showcases sports personalities popular to avid fans. You create a scrapbook for your favorite player or team. You can track their career, including photos, newspaper articles, and game reviews. If your man has a favorite sports celebrity, this scrapbooking template will make a great gift that you know he doesn't have.

Team - This sports scrapbooking template can be based on the team's symbol or mascot. You can showcase individual team players and stars. Demonstrating support for your favorite team or college, the team scrapbooking template is embellished with ticket stubs, treasured pieces of uniforms, and a color scheme based on team colors. This scrapbooking template is a great gift for team associations, alumni groups, and school classes.

Equipment - Based on the type of equipment used in sports, your equipment scrapbooking template can be designed around equipment for many sports, relying on the equipment for a more general sports theme, or the equipment for a specific sport with that sport as your focus. Cut-outs and die-cuts in the shape of the equipment makes great frames for photos and documents.

3. Emotional

Scrapbooking templates designed to represent the emotional nature of events rely on color and design to complement your photos and memorabilia and tell the whole story. Wedding-oriented scrapbooks tell a story of love and married life. Career-oriented scrapbooks describe challenges, struggles, and successes. Memorial scrapbooks express grief and sorrow for the loss of a loved one. You illustrate the emotion with color or characters.

Color - Bright and dark colors express different subtle emotional intensities that you can't usually describe with pictures or scrapbook embellishments. And specific colors represent different emotions. Red denotes passion, courage, and action. White denotes innocence, love, and purity. Yellow represents energy and enthusiasm. Blue speaks of inner peace and spiritual love. You can use different shades or saturations of the same color to express different intensity of emotion.

Characters - Using characters is an effective way to express emotions. Facial expression is an easy way to communicate feelings. You can have your characters involved in different activities related to the photos and memorabilia on the page. Complementing your characters with background illustrations is also effective. For example, showing your character taking a walk in the rain could communicate solitude, sorrow, or sadness. Showing the same character on the beach in full sunlight would speak to joy, playfulness, and adventure.

Abhishek is a Scrapbooking expert and he has got some great Scrapbooking Secrets up his sleeves! Download his FREE 73 Pages Ebook, "Scrapbooking Made Easy!" from his website http://www.Fun-Galore.com/821/index.htm. Only limited Free Copies available.

Digital Scrapbooking - Great Tips For Advanced Scrapbookers

Scrapbooking is one of the most popular hobbies around these days. Scrappers are well-acquainted with the craft, working with the materials and tools like pros. Combining cutting lots of paper shapes, gluing photos, and sticking a collection of ribbons, die-cuts, and stamps on each page is their passion. It's hard for an experienced scrapper to imagine doing it any other way.

But computers can invade anything - even scrapbooking. Modern technology introduces a whole new approach to scrapbooking that uses graphics programs to create the basic scrapbook elements and page layouts. Using a computer to create scrapbooks, known as digital scrapbooking, involves creating page layouts with the help of computer software that edits photos, creates graphics, inserts borders and text, and allows you to "paste in" digital embellishments.

Using high-quality paper, you print your scrapbook pages on a high-resolution printer and then attach your traditional scrapbook materials. More tech-savvy scrappers can even save elements and pages on the hard drive or store them to DVD or CD to share with others electronically. These days, several websites give you the ability to create an online scrapbook by uploading your photos and images to their prepared digital scrapbook albums.

There are several computer programs that are great for scrapbooking. Most popular are Adobe PhotoShop Elements 2.0 and CS, Microsoft Picture It!, Lumapix, and JASC's Paint Shop Pro. They are all effective for manipulating designs. The features that scrappers will appreciate include cropping photos, replacing backgrounds and colors, adding text, and inserting borders and graphics.

The programs we've mentioned weren't created for scrapbooking, but they offer many features scrapbookers will find useful. It's easy to isolate and "cut out" specific images from a photo. You can apply color schemes to your designs. Cropping photos and trimming page elements is easy and quick, and the programs allow you to create your own design elements.

The major obstacle to applying these high-end programs to scrapbooking is in learning how to use the software. For people who haven't used graphics programs, there can be a steep learning curve, and becoming adept may take some time. They're expensive too. You can expect to pay several hundred dollars for one of these software packages.

Once you are familiar with the programs, though, using the software for other projects is interesting and fun. Their great value for scrapbooking lies in their versatility. You're only limited by your imagination in what you can create to make a super scrapbook. You can blend your own colors, create your own borders, and add texture digitally. These programs offer a variety of virtual textures: marble, canvass, cobblestone, leather, silk, and a range of natural color-texture combinations.

Easier programs dedicated to scrapbooking are also available. They include Hallmark, CK, Scrapbook Studio, and Scrapbook Assistants. Designed specifically for digital scrapbooking, they're easier and faster to learn and much less expensive. However, they are not as flexible as the high-end programs, and your options can be limited to a prescribed set of colors, pre-set page settings, and canned layouts. But they do make the job easy, and you won't spend weeks to months trying to figure out how they work.

An in-between solution might be a program like Microsoft Digital Image Pro. Less expensive than Adobe PhotoShop, it's easier to learn and has more features than the digital scrapbooking programs.

If you're not sure whether you want to try digital scrapbooking, you can try it out by downloading free digital scrapbooking programs from the Internet. Be aware, though, that these programs may not be as effective as those you purchase. That's because free downloads are often used as product samples, and not all menu features are turned on in the free trial offers and downloads. They will give you a sense of what the software can do, and trying out free digital scrapbooking software may help you make your decision.

Most programs come with tutorials and help features that teach you how to do major tasks. The step-by-step instructions allow you to explore features and sharpen techniques as you learn the software. You can also probably get online help through blogs and forums run by scrapbooking websites.

Abhishek is a Scrapbooking expert and he has got some great Scrapbooking Secrets up his sleeves! Download his FREE 73 Pages Ebook, "Scrapbooking Made Easy!" from his website http://www.Fun-Galore.com/821/index.htm. Only limited Free Copies available.

Free Printable Scrapbook Pages - Great Scrapbooks on a Budget

Looking to get started scrapbooking without spending a lot of money? The way to do this is to make use of all the free printable scrapbooking pages that are online. The amount of sites that are giving away scrapbooking materials is quite impressive and will allow you to spend almost nothing to make a great scrapbook. You can find pages, titles, designs, layouts, quote and step-by-step projects. If you are just starting out with scrapbooking then you should take a look at the free digital scrapbooking page kits.

To get started decide on the theme you would like your scrapbook to be about. Now type in "free scrapbook kits" in Google and you will find numerous sites giving away whole scrapbooking kits that you can print out. The large amount of free printable scrapbook pages available will provide you with the materials you will need. Let's say you would like to make a scrapbook with a birthday theme. Alter your search phrase to "free birthday scrapbook kits". Again you will find a large number of sites that provide scrapbooking kits for birthdays.

Now download the kit of your choice. Once you have downloaded the free printable scrapbook pages go ahead and printout the materials. You should be able to find kits that provide all the materials you will need to make your scrapbook. These kits will include pages, letters, designs and embellishments. Arrange the items together that will make each page and select the pictures for each page. Now go ahead and put your scrapbooking pages together.

The last step is to create the journaling for your scrapbook. Make sure to spend a bit of time on this step. The title, captions and words you use in the scrapbook put the pictures into context. Without the journaling your scrapbook will just be a good-looking book of pictures. Later generations will appreciate the beauty of it but will be lost as to what the book is about.

The amount of free printable scrapbook pages that is available online is a real boon for new and experienced scrapbookers. Don't pass up this great resource. Happy scrapbooking.

If you would like to learn more about making great scrapbooks without a large expense then visit my site at http://www.freeprintablescrapbooking.com/free-printable-scrapbook-pages.html

Erik Birkeland writes on business and family related issues.

To read more about scrapbooking and how to enhance your experience with it then visit http://www.freeprintablescrapbooking.com

Cost free Scrapbooking-3 great ideas

Americans love of scrapbooking! And why would this not a popular hobby? You get to remember and keep your special memories to do something really creative. It is addictive! There is no wonder that so many people enjoy scrapbooking.

But scrapbooking can really put a dent in your wallet. Do you have the scrapbook themselves or an album, mostly of craft shop. And then you have to find many special papers and decorations to add some flare to your Notepad. Tools such as glue and scissors add to the cost. If you're an avid scrapbooker, you can invest a large part of your money.

Scrapbooking does not need to be expensive, though. In fact, you can convert to a free hobby. We already know that you are because you're a resourceful scrapbooker! Now, that ingenuity of application on your hobby and the things you need to search around your House. Here are some ideas that might help you scrapbooking in a free pursuit.

Don't buy your paper-recycling

You can buy a prepared Notepad or album for your scrapbooks, but you don't have to.
You can make most of the books that you find today in craft stores. Give it a try.

You have the time and patience, recycle your own papers. Newspapers, loose paper from around the House, or scratch paper from the school of your children use. Recycling is easy, even though there are many steps in the process. All materials that you need are waste paper, a bucket of water and bleach, a blender, an embroidery hoop and some offsetting. Your own colors and textures for a truly unique scrapbook making.

It may take some time, too. First, you need to tear the paper into smaller pieces. Then you must dry the pieces after the recycling process. Set your proud when you respond, "Oh, no. I have every bit of myself, even the paper! " If you are interested in how to recycle your own scrapbooking paper, do a little research on the Internet, and have at it!

You do not have the time or interest in your own Notepad paper recycling, you can simple bond or pages from magazines or newspapers. They do not need to be recycled to add some real flair to your scrapbook. For example, you can add images and color photos and ads to your pages. You can find photos and articles related to your Notepad theme and add some interesting touches to your scrapbook pages.

Decoration-Go through your closets, drawers and cabinets did not buy

Most of us are pack rats. We keep everything just in case we need a scrapbook. Well, now is the time for all these treasures hunt. You don't have to buy fancy new decoration for your scrapbook. You can make your pages look great use of items in your home. The advantage of doing this is that the unique personal touch that you can't add to your scrapbook of a craft shop to buy.

Examples are old buttons that you have saved to back to those old blouse or shirt, side from old lingerie or ribbons you have saving wrap gifts. Can you faux gems of old or broken costume jewelry. You can scraps of old clothing texture add to your scrapbook pages. You can add interesting edges broken chains of old belts, jewelry and clothing.

Personalize your scrapbook with paper memories

You can literally fill a scrapbook without to buy anything. Use old tickets for concerts, movies, and buses mirror of your theme. You can memories such as old parking tickets or receipts from the time of your page focus items. Old programs of the school plays, greeting cards, party invitations, old shopping lists and add personal notes to the memories and make great decorations and graphics.

Scrapbookers are creative people from the beginning. That ingenuity apply to finding your own scrapbook materials, and you save a bundle while you have a family heirloom!

Abhishek is an expert Scrapbooking Scrapbooking secrets and he has some great his sleeves! Download free e-book 73 pages, "Scrapbooking Made Easy!" of his website http://www.FunGalore.com-/821/index.htm. Only a limited free copies available.