How to Make a Thanksgiving Scrapbook

Thanksgiving is a great celebration that brings family members in from far and wide. Making sure you capture the day is important in chronicling your family history. Here are some ideas to help you make a great Thanksgiving scrapbook that you will want to pull out every year.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Getting the Shots

1. Give the kids the camera. Sometimes those funny shots of cranberry sauce on the floor or random candid shots that kids can get away with taking can give a more personal dimension to your scrapbook pages.

2. Go step by step. Try getting pictures of everything from the beginning not just after the table is set with everyone gathered around. You may have different pages that focus on the cooking, setting the table, watching football, people entering your home, cars in the drive or any other parts of your celebration.

3. Vary your camera shots. Make sure that you have a range of distance in your pictures. Take some of the whole room, groups of people or things and close-ups.

4. Save all the pictures. With digital cameras, it is easy to erase pictures on the spot that you do not think are worth keeping. Unfortunately, some of these may be the best after development. After all, you never know what picture or part of a picture you may want when designing your scrapbook pages.

Creating the Book

5. Group your developed pictures. Choose what you want to highlight on each of your pages. Some groupings may require only one page, while others may be a spread of two or more pages.

6. Find background paper that compliments all of the pictures for the page. Decorative pages with fall leaves, turkeys or vegetables that you may not normally use in your scrapbooks are great places to start.

7. Arrange and crop your pictures. You will want a variety of picture sizes, so figure out how you want the page designed and crop some of your pictures to highlight your larger shots. For example, cropping just the turkey out of a picture for a dinner page or grandpa's shoes on the floor while napping after dinner can add character to an otherwise flat page.

8. Journal the details. Leave room on your page to jot notes about the pictures and what happened that day. Descriptions of funny inside jokes or tender moments create the description and depth to make the scrapbook a memory not just a photo album.