Crop Corner

It's that time of year for family reunions! Reunions are a great time to get together for an outdoor picnic and to catch up on what's been happening in your loved ones' lives. Family reunions are great events to scrap, too! You can display a group photo or even individual photos showcasing some special accomplishments.
LeNae chose a yellow background with a paisley border, then used papers in coordinating colors to cover three slide mounts. She used the slide mounts to frame photos and journaling, accenting them with sliver heart-shaped clips. She cut her computer journaling into long strips and accented the journaling with ribbons and brads.

Using color is one of my favorite parts of scrapbooking. Yet new scrappers often tell me they feel intimidated by it. They hear a phrase like "tertiary colors" and feel they need to take an art class or consult a color wheel before choosing their papers. That's simply not true! If you can get dressed in the morning, you can choose the right colors for your page. Part of picking colors will depend on your personal taste. I LOVE red, and choose it often for my pages (and for my cards, and clothes and throughout my home). You might be partial to blue, green or brown. You may love bright colors, or prefer more subtle earth tones. Go with your instincts. You'll find the colors you love are easier and more fun to work with--and scrapbooking is, after all, about having fun.

From the Forum: Don't Let This Happen to You! Some of the most memorable lessons learned in life are the most painful ones. Ann, on the Forum, started a discussion where people posted "Lessons learned while scrapbooking." You'll laugh, you'll cry, and maybe you will learn something from someone else's mistakes. Heat guns seem to be the center of many of these lessons - just something to think about.

When I packed my bags for the hospital, the most important thing wasn't a focal point, sugarless lollipops or a stopwatch. Nope, it was my journal. Even though I wasnt a scrapbooker way back in 1996 when my daughter was born (shocking, I know!), I was an avid journaler, and I wanted to record the details of my experience of giving birth. Why not create a simple blank journal to take with you on your journey? You can leave blank pages to add those lovely labor and delivery shots that your semi-conscious husband might take.

Your wacky and wonderful transition into married life deserves to be remembered long after the honeymoon is over. But how? Enter the scrapbook experts to help you make the most of your new-some twosome. Whether you lounged for a month in Maui or you stole away for a quick weekend at a bed & breakfast, honeymoon pages inaugurate your newlywed scrapbook. Its your first excursion into the world as a real husband and wife. Photos are essential if you want to capture the romance of a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, but what if you want to keep it personal? No problem. Even just a few tokens of the locale, like a room service menu, postcards, the hotel brochure, or the do not disturb sign, are enough to satisfy the curious and spur your memory years from now. Be sure to jot down the few secrets that you are willing to share, though: date, place and your best memory.

Its finally happened! You found him, you love him, he loves you, he proposed and you said yes. You are engaged! As the whirlwind of tulle and butter cream frosting begins, you may wonder how best to preserve these precious pre-marital moments. What do you save? What do you toss? With a few quick tips, we can help you scrapbook loves beautiful beginnings. Its best to begin at the beginning, and in this case, you actually have two beginnings, one being when you met Mr. Right, and the other is when you became engaged. Depending on how much memorabilia you have, you can choose to do separate scrapbooks for each story, preface your engagement with pages of how you met, or end your dating story with a few pages documenting your preparation for the wedding. Options abound!

If youre not sure where to start when recording your babys first year, let a jar help you to decide! Journal jars are a fun concept that provide journaling prompts for you to use either on a scrapbook page, or in an entire album. I found a sticker sheet from Rusty Pickle, mounted all of the stickers on cardstock, and emptied outwhat elsea jar of pickles and put the journal cards inside. You can make this ahead of time and when baby arrives, start pulling out random cards, and journal or scrapbok the subject on each one. Use them as prompts for individual pages, or create a companion album to hold all of your entries.

WHETHER YOU'RE A BRAND-NEW DIGITAL SCRAPBOOKER or you've been designing with pixels for years, Actions will make creating gorgeous, stylish pages quicker and easier than ever before. Visit a few of our recommended sites and get ready to play. And if you've generated a dazzling effect of your own, create an Action and share it with others! Check out more cool digital ideas, plus over 400 digital elements, a trial version of Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and more in Digital Designs for scrapbooking by Renee Pearson.

My husband and I recently got back from a Mediterranean cruise. We visited Rome, Monte Carlo, Florence, Naples, Santorini, Mykonos, Katakolon, Corfu, Kusadasi, and Venice. Since each place was more beautiful than the next, we ended up with over 800 digital photographs! Now, I won't say that all of those photographs are worthy of being shared with friends and family (I can just imagine the yawns!), I did want the two of us to be able to see the pictures frequently and remember this incredible trip. So I decided to make the best of them into screen savers for both of our computers (one PC and one Macintosh).

Ask Rebecca: How do I safely include newspaper articles in my scrapbooks? I get asked frequently about how to include newspaper articles in scrapbooks. Due to the high amounts of both lignin and acid in newsprint the paper deteriorates very quickly becoming brittle and turning yellow. The main cause for concern in scrapbooking is not only the breakdown of the newspaper article but how the acid in the article will affect the rest of the page and even the album. A) Copy them on to acid free paper. You can have this done at your local copy center or you can simply scan them in to your computer and print them out on cardstock. Personally, I prefer to have articles color copied because you achieve a nearly perfect replica of the article keeping the shades of the original paper.