Scrapbooking with Christmas Lights
Other People Are Reading
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Introduction
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Scrapbooking is a popular hobby and refers to the practice of embellishing photo books with scrap pieces of decorative papers, memorabilia and artistic details. Instead of simply holding pictures of a vacation or special event, a scrapbook may also feature related stickers, quotations, tickets, buttons, brochures and journaling that further remind the reader of the occasion. Christmas is especially popular as a scrapbooking theme.
Christmas Scrapbooking
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Walk into any scrapbooking shop and you will be amazed at the wide variety of scrapbooking supplies, especially those related to Christmas and other holidays. You can easily find pages and stickers featuring Santa, snowmen, reindeer and nativity scenes; you can even buy entire scrapbooking kits that are specifically Christmas-oriented.
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Lights Out
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You can buy border pieces that depict two-dimensional Christmas lights or tiny replicas that are strung on wires. However, some folks want to extend their creativity by using actual Christmas lights. Maybe they wish to preserve a strand of lights from Granny's last Christmas, or baby's first. To preserve a string of real Christmas lights for use in a scrapbook, the strand must be cut down to size after being unplugged. Wire cutters work best. The strand may then be placed around the border of a page using glue dots or other adhesives, and circles of colored paper could be placed behind each tiny bulb to produce the effect that the light is on.
Turning on the Creativity
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If you want your lights to actually illuminate, purchase a small strand that are battery-powered. Such lights can be found in the school-supply section during Christmas, as high-school students use them to decorate their lockers. However, the biggest challenge with these lights is hiding the battery pack within your page design so that it doesn't look sloppy. Instead of using lights inside on a page layout, consider saving this embellishment for use as an outside decoration for the entire book. The battery pack can then be hidden by extending the outer binding of the book.
Set Up
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Don't use strands of Christmas lights on every page; this will make your scrapbook monotonous. If using the lights on several pages, set them up in differing ways on each page. Try wrapping them across a paper tree, draping them from the top of a page or twisting them into a little wreath of light.
More Christmas Scrapbooking Tips
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If you're creating an entire Christmas-themed scrapbook, try not to deviate from your theme. Stick with Christmas colors and characters throughout.
Keep things in order. Don't place pages of a Christmas play in the middle of several pages where kids are ripping open their gifts.
Stay in chronological order as well, especially if you're doing a scrapbook covering several Christmases.
Remember to turn off the strand of Christmas lights when storing your scrapbook. This will lengthen the battery life and prevent damage.
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