How To Scrapbook

Hi, I'm Susie Jefferson and I'm thrilled to have been invited by Kay and Graeme of Blade Rubber Stamps to come and talk to you today all about what I know about scrapbooking. I'm going to show you now what I would call an old school album. This is the sort of thing that your parents would probably have had - usually black pages, maybe dark grey textured.

This is actually one I made. I'll talk about it on another session, because old school is now actually coming back into fashion. Now, the next generation was this kind of thing.

I've taken these out of an old album because it was literally falling to bits. You probably remember these. These have got the plastic sheet which, if I can actually get it to come off, with difficulty, and these peeled over.

Now you can see why we've dumped them. You see how this has gone all horribly yellow here, and look at that, because that's actually rubber and it's actually destroying the photos. You can see how acidic it is by how yellow the paper goes, and pretty gruesome.

I mean that's actually me as a baby, 12 days old, would you believe. The less heard about that the better, many moons ago. But you can see how it's all rotting and going really nasty, and that page now is virtually destroyed.

This is where I would actually now be remounting this onto something archival, acid free. Acid free is really important especially if you've only got the one copy, like my Christening certificate. Right, what are we doing now? Well, we've got basically two styles.

We've either got the loose leaf ones, which are the pages like this, which can go into a post bound album, or we have the ones that have got a pocket at the top. So, that's a typical one, it's just folded paper, but it's archival, it's acid free, very plain background. In fact, if you were making your own you could use a really good watercolour paper - check they're acid free.

And these are page protectors. So that's the sort of thing. So that could be your ordinary page or it could be your page protector. This is a post bound album.

So you can actually fold that back, unscrew, put extra pages in. You usually get 10 in an album, so that's giving you like 20 sides, so you could actually put a few more packets in. The trick is not to go too far to the point where the album is actually bulging out.

This is another style. This one is a ring bound album. So this, you'd probably be more familiar with.

Stick the pages in and obviously you've done all your artwork, you've popped it in. Fingers aren't touching it, so if you've got a dribbly dog or somebody spilt the coffee, anything like that, you know that it's going to stay clean. Now, here are some other styles: board books, this one's like a little handbag.

It hasn't just got to be a flat page all the time. That opens up and as you can see those little bits in there - that's to allow for the height of your embellishment. So if you're going to put in silk flowers or anything like that, that's going to allow for the height.

Again, this is archival acid free. It doesn't have to be white, you can spray it, paint it with acrylics, they're perfect to use, waterproof, also acid free. And then we've got something like these little binder books.

Again, just your usual ring binding, open it up to work in, put your page back, close it. But if this is cardboard, I would say cover both sides with your scrapbook paper. Your scrapbook paper is acid-free, archival.

They say it should last at least 50-60 years, and of course the paper is going to keep the surface of your photo from something like cardboard, so the actual scrapbook paper is protecting your photographs as you're working on them. So again, once you've done it, that's going to last for generations to come and it's something that you can hand down to your family with pride. This is a little ring bound one.

You can buy several gadgets for these, put in