Creating Personalized Gifts with your Scrapbooking Supplies!

Scrapbookers tend to have an abundance of supplies in their homes, to the extent that some have enough inventory to open a small (or maybe not so small!) store. Why not put those supplies to use for a few things other than just scrapbooking? A natural progression from scrapbooking is to start creating your own, handmade cards. Many scrapbookers will design birthday cards and other holiday cards from their supplies, adding a personalized touch and bringing new meaning to the cards. Your scrapbooking supplies can be used for making a lot of other personalized gifts, so don't stop at card making!

An obvious gift for a scrapbooker is to create themed, mini-albums for special people in your life. A themed album is simply a scrapbook of which all pages are related to the same topic, for example, you could create an album for your child's teacher at the end of the school year, and within it have photographs of each of the students in his or her class, and have each of the students create a letter to the teacher thanking him or her for a wonderful school year. Other possibilities for giving themed scrapbook albums are to new parents- creating an album for the baby's first year will be a treasured gift to any new parent.

In this type of gift album, you would decorate each of the pages, and leave spaces to insert photographs after the baby has been born. You can be sure this personalized gift will be a keepsake the parents and child will save forever, and will certainly receive lots of "oohs" and "ahhs" at the baby shower! Have you ever given recipe books to newlyweds? Sometimes the bridal shower organizers will ask everyone to bring an index card with their favorite recipes on them to share with the couple. Why not create an album of recipes? You could take the index cards and attach them to decorated pages of a mini-album, or you could print the recipes right onto the pages of the album to create a more customized look.

In addition to creating mini-albums as gifts, scrapbookers can create calendars using their supplies. These make terrific winter holiday gifts, since it's right before the start of the new year! Scrapbook calendars can be made completely from scratch, or you can purchase blank, pre-made calendars in all different sizes and formats to then add your photographs and embellishments onto.

Even non-scrapbookers take photographs, and most people like to hang framed photographs around their home. You can use your supplies to create matted photo frames. Choose some of your favorite patterned and solid cardstock, and insert it into inexpensive frames. Using a photograph to measure the size you need to make the opening for, take a craft knife and a ruler and cut out the opening in the center of your paper. Matted frames have a designer feel to them, and will make even the most inexpensive of store bought frames look like a piece of art when hung on the wall.

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