One of the hobbies that has the whole America in a frenzy is scrapbooking. From ordinary cutting of photos and putting ribbons, the craze of scrapbooking have gone beyond the simple and developed into one sophisticated operations.
Gone are the days when you have to dye the paper, cut the graphics and paste the decorations. Most people do not even draw anymore. And certainly, only a few ever stitch their own scrapbooks.
All they need to do now is buy blank scrapbooks that are already prepared, pick some really nice stickers and decorations in the craft stores and voila, they are well on their way to a great scrapbook.
Still for the newbies in scrapbooking, the basics tools are still the best. In fact, in getting started with scrapbooking, you may want to stick to the old and basic materials first just to be able to get the feel of how is it to really do scrapbooking. Although the new trends and materials provide great convenience, it somehow does all the work for the scrapbookers, leaving the essence of creative creations behind.
To get you started, here are some of the basic materials that you've got to have in hand.
Scrapbook paper
You can't get started with scrapbooking if you don’t have a scrapbook to begin with. There are blank scrapbooks that you can find in your craft stores. You can use those to get you started.
You can also start with pieces of specialized papers, recycled ones, colored papers, art papers or construction papers that you can compile after. Some scrapbookers do this because they don’t want to make all the pages uniform. After which you can make a cover and then you can stitch the pages and the cover together.
Scissors
You can never make a scrapbook without a good old scissors in your box of tools. This is perhaps the most basic of your tools as this is the one that you will be using in cutting shapes and graphics as well as putting designs on the pages itself.
You can also buy scissors that cut designed lines and not just your usual straight lines. Much like the pinking shears used in sewing, these specialized scissors can be real handy when cutting graphics and decorations for your pages.
Cutters and cutting boards
Not all cuttings can be done with a scissors. Sometimes, you need a cutter to make your work a little easier. When using a cutter, make sure that you have a cutting board underneath to avoid cutting papers underneath or worse putting cut lines on the surface of the table. In addition to the cushion, cutting boards also have guide lines that will help you cut paper in a straight line. This will save you a lot of work in sketching and using the ruler just to be able to cut it straight. Cutting boards also have measurements that will help you when you need to cut paper at a certain length.
Sticky stuff
This is another tool that you cannot go without when doing scrapbooking.
Most people use the glue gun especially when trying to put on decorations that are really bulky such as buttons or gemstones. When dealing with paper, you can use ordinary glue and even paste. Glue gun will only make the paper look bulky and wrinkled.
February 23, 2010, 10:24:41 AM