If you, girls, are loving the photos taken by your friends during their trips around the world and always have found interesting the personal diaries where to write down feelings, adventures and misadventures, you should consider to start to have a new hobby which is really spreading in the whole globe, the scrapbooking.
I was introduced in this hobby by a dear Belgian friend knew with the help of a community where we both have our own blogs, one day she suggested me to have a look to some creative pages online made with photos, phrases and scraps; it was the first time for her too and we both immediately fell in love with that new interest, now every day we use to meet online with an instant messenger, we create our layouts in our own flats and chat at the same time, sharing ideas and suggestions about the scrapbooking (and about our personal lives as well).
Maybe, like everyone of us, you have some photos waiting to be placed in anonymous albums and also waiting to be missed for years inside a drawer between unimportant objects. Now you can combine the useful with the pleasurable by trying out the funny hobby which is the scrapbooking and I am sure you will not leave it anymore.
All you need to do to start is finding a good shop of hobbies and crafts and buy some material such as colored cardboards, glue, colored drawing pens and scissors; what I mentioned is the basic necessary, but it is even better if you also have a good printer, a good internet connection, decorations in fabric, nice stamps, glittered gel, creative-shaped scissors, stickers, ribbons and so on, remember that every kind of material can be used for the scrapbooking, also products taken from other hobbies.
When you have all the material ready, choose a good place where to work, it must be peaceful, well-enlightened and well-ventilated, choose a wide area where to lean on your arms and your material and go for it.
Choose a nice paper which will be your background, place some photos on it without glueing them, place in a creative way some stuffs (for example: title of the page, decorations like borders, flowers and other objects and so on) which match well with the color and the position of each other stuff, think about a small story to write about those photos and the moments when they have been taken and than trace a small sketch onto another paper to remember the placement of every element in your page. Start to glue every single object following the sketch you prepared, you can also change the position of some stuff if you do not like completely how you arranged them before. At the end I am sure you will feel gratified by your own creativity and you will want to show your work to all the persons you know and create new layouts.
If you want to know and learn more about this addicting hobby, you can find a whole world about scrapbooking especially surfing the net, just use a powerful search engine and you will find tons of websites of suppliers and vendors, cultural groups and personal blogs, you will find tons of every sort of freebies to download, print and use in your layouts, you will discover different sizes and shapes for cardboards, different materials for the same kind of stuffs, different styles of scrapping, you will know other scrappers from around the world and someone of them will surely be very close to your city or even live in your same street and so on.
Just about the net, I feel to give you a suggestion about a great community of scrappers of any sort of age, condition and provenance, a place to visit and join to be part of a big all-loving "family", its website is the "scrapbookchalet.com
"; have a look especially at the message board, it is plenty of interesting discussions about the scrapbooking, life events and other interests.
Thus, girls, believe me: show the greatness of your imagination and "produce" and share your layouts with the collateral complementary world of the scrappers!!
