Crafting expert Suzanne McNeill has a great suggestion--rather than purchasing scrapbooking supplies, explore your house and discover dozens of items that can be used to enhance albums or scrapbooks--plus, it's a terrific way to recycle! Just make sure to test materials with a pH testing marker before using in scrapbooks to ensure archival quality.
Here are some ideas for making optimal use of common yet interesting household finds:
- Use coffee lid cans, bottle caps, jar lids, and cookie cutters to make templates for cropping photos (figure A).
- Use pencil erasers, vegetables, and foam meat trays or restaurant carry-out foam boxes as "rubber" stamps.
- Make several photocopies of die cuts, enlarging and reducing the copies to produce various sizes. Cut out the shapes.
- Use coloring book pictures as patterns.
- Cut chip snack bags with foil liners and use on pages to back photos or as "frames."
- Make a wavy edge ruler from a piece of cardboard, a laminated place mat, or from an aluminum foil or plastic wrap box. Laminated place mats with checkered designs often work well for projects because the checkered pattern allows for even spacing (figure B).
- To make a scallop, trace around a small spool of thread. Line up the spool on the long end of the cardboard strip and repeatedly trace around half of the spool to create the effect. Cut out the design with a sharp pair of scissors.
- To make a lettering guide from a plastic lid, simply use a mat knife or scissors to cut a square in the size of the letter desired. Such a template will enable you to create letters the same size and will allow the letters to be evenly lined up across the page.
- Glue a photo to a foam tray to produce dimension.
- Use gold or silver cupcake liners as accents behind round snapshots. Cut the liners in half to make a fan or to simulate the sun (figure C).
- Use leftover fabric scraps for embellishing scrapbook pages. Cut out designs printed on the fabric and glue them to scrapbook pages.
- Make a lettering template from plastic canvas rows of plastic in between openings as spacers for even lettering. When using the guide, slight adjustments can be made by moving the plastic canvas template to allow for larger or smaller letters, such as "W"s versus "I"s (figure D).
- Stitch together leftover fabrics to form an over-the-door scrapbook supply holder.
- Make pop-up scrapbook pages by gluing a ballpoint pen spring to the back of the photo.
- Make a fold-over paper spring from two strips of paper.
- Make an envelope page or a handy pocket to store report cards or letters. Cut one page in half, glue the sides and bottom to the lower half of the second page, and leave the top portion unglued.
- Save used postage stamps to make colorful and interesting borders for a travel page.
- Make a decorative border using a hole punch.
- Make a lacy border by lining up a spool of thread along the outside edge of the paper. Trace halfway around the outside edge of the spool of thread, and repeat the pattern along the edge of the paper. Use a sharp pair of scissors to cut out scallops, and use a hole punch to create a lacy effect.
- Save scraps of paper and photographs to create small photo accents with punches. Make photo flowers, foot- or handprints and more.
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