Craft Tips While Working

If you feel that printing all the pictures on the photo paper is an expensive affair. Then you can print out rough pictures on card stock and layout ideas from the Internet on the square sheets cut to the size of the picture to fit a 3-ring binder. It saves paper, time, and lots of trees.

The photo or picture can also be laid on paper from the scrap material left over after using a circle cutter or punch on paper. The photo will cover the holes in the piece of paper and the paper will appear "intact" to the viewer. Isn't it great!

Unused pictures and templates can also be used for bartering at a local crafts store in your area. Some shopkeepers may give you free or discounted products for giving them your unused pictures and pages so that they can make scrapbook layouts for display. For example some scrap booking store will give you die-cuts in exchange for pictures.

If you get prints more than the required or double then they can be used as extras when creating pages and if you get prints made doubled, it is much cheaper than reprints.

The wrapper of the alphabet letters can also be used in great ways. By cutting colored part of the letter and then putting on different colored paper, this gives the letters the look like they have been outlined in different colors.

You can use your old decorating project stencils and make your own cutouts or draw the designs on your pages. They come in almost anything you can imagine-flowers, vines, flags, toys, country, etc.

Realize you don't need everything! Scrap booking was started before there were a lot of templates, die-cuts, fancy scissors, etc available. You can make some of your best pages with paper, regular scissors, a black pen and some imagination.

Instead of spending a lot of money on stickers, die-cuts and page toppers you can try various matting techniques to add variety to your pages. Instead of buying page toppers, you can easily create your own. You can print out phrases and sayings on acid free paper.

Use a copy machine to copy the image onto a transparency for reducing or enlarging as needed. Light box can be used for tracing the image on your scrapbook page. The image can be found with ease in various coloring books. Many have cute pages for all the holidays and seasons. And don't throw the transparency away when you're finished you can swap those with your scrap-booking friends.

Much cheaper materials like cotton balls or eye shadow applicators can be used in place of chalk applicators.

You can easily make a light box for tracing patterns at home from the acrylic box-type frame. Remove the cardboard insert from a purchased frame and glue one cardboard paper towel tube into each corner of the inverted frame. Turn your flashlight on and stand it up under the light box. It works great!

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