Memory album ideas

There's no time like the present, so grab your supplies and start sorting your photos.

It is easy to let photographs pile up over time. Who has enough free time to cut and paste and organize pages. Well, a little a day can go a long way, so get started now.

If you don't already have some supplies, head to your nearest discount retail store and start shopping. For basics, find some decorative paper made just for scrapbooking, so it must be acid-free and archival quality. Then look for scissors which cut different shapes and patterns. Archival, acid-free tape and/or glue is necessary as well so you can afix your pictures to each page. And cardstock that is acid-free will provide the backing you need for each page in your album.

At home, decide how you want to arrange your album or just start picking pictures at random. Since you will be leaving the back side of each page blank and ready for additonal information or pictures later, don't worry too much about oranization if you don't want to.

Once you have picked out 5-6 pictures, look at each one and see what the central focus is. Then you want to cut out background images on the picture so when people flip through your album all they will see is what is important to see. A face. A body. Or a scenic background.

You can cut a matching background of plain colored paper to put behind your picture or you can just afix it directly to the designer paper you have purchased.

Then you can head to your computer and set out to add a story to go with your pictures. That is what separates a memory album from a photo album. The memory albums tell a story and take the viewer into the life being lived. You can add brief information like names and dates or you can get into great detail about an event or someone's life.

No matter how you decide to go about it, doing one page of pictures a day will add up to an entire memory album down the road. So get started.