layouts

Have you seen scrapbooking paper dolls simply everywhere lately? Have you heard the buzz about them and want to try some yourself? Basically, paper dolls have been around for centuries but only in the last year or so have they been readily available for scrapbooking in acid free papers. The charm of a paper doll is that you can dress it to look like the subjects on the page, dress it ethnically to accent a geographic place, or dress it to coordinate with a themed event.

Make your paper doll snappy and realistic instead of flat and boring! No two paperdolls need look the same in your books! There are some special tips to making your dolls great! You can change the embellishments to make them any way you like. Join me as I share some websites, ideas, and embellishing tricks with you.

What joy music brings to our lives! Whether it is a wedding dance, band recital, piano practice, the car radio, or Dad just humming a tune under his breath, music brightens our lives. Music evokes a sense of time and place and belonging. Music can also add dimension to our scrapbook pages! Even if you can't carry a tune, you can have music in your albums!

Here are a few life events that connect music to our lives. Let's document them for our albums:

All the world loves a parade! And summertime is full of parades! You can choose from local children's neighborhood bike parades to the extravagant Disney electric light and themed parades on vacation. There are 4th of July parades and all the city booster parades too. Our lake even has a boat parade each year!

Got the scrapbooking doldrums that often come with winter? Are all your pages starting to look the same? Create the new rage! Puzzle photo pages like these two above are a visual treat for the album of your choice. Of course you can get puzzle templates from your local or online scrapbooking supplier. I decided to do mine the budget-minded way. If you have an 8 piece children's puzzle around the house or buy one for about $1.25, you can do this page in about one hour with the following materials:

a children's 8 piece puzzle,

Let's try something new! My albums have many, many pages done with rectangular shapes, circles, and ovals. I also have my share of pages done with coordinating die cuts in varied shapes and sizes to go with the themes of the photos. But my eye longed for a little bit of a change. I came up with this simple, fast, (and surprisingly elegant) treatment to give my album pages just the variety I longed for. And, talk about speed pages--this goes so fast, you'll have time to do several! They will go together like lightening! And we can all use FAST page scrapping ideas that still look fabulous, right?