How to Punch Holes in a Scrapbook

Punching holes in a scrapbook saves money on binding services.

Scrapbooks preserve memories in style with colorful pages, intricate borders, and everything from puffy stickers to miniature jewels artfully placed around photographs. While you can buy a professionally bound scrapbook, the dedicated scrapbooker makes her books from cover to cover, using cardstock for the covers and a hole puncher plus ribbon or key rings to bind her books. Punching holes in a scrapbook is a simple process that will save you money on premade books and binding services, leaving more cash to spend on the fun stuff such as stamps and die cuts.

Things You'll Need

• Scrapbook covers/cardstock
• Ruler
• Pencil
• Single hole punch
• Scrapbook pages

Instructions

1. Measure the length of your scrapbook cover to space your holes evenly apart on the left-hand side. For a three hole binding, the rule is one hole 1 inch in from the top, one hole in the center and one hole 1 inch from the bottom.

2. Draw a dot to mark each planned hole 1/2 inch away from the left edge to ensure you do not punch through the edge and ruin your cover.

3. Line up your front and back covers and punch out your dots. If your hole punch is not strong enough to punch through the front and back covers at the same time, repeat steps 1 and 2 to mark your holes and then punch out the dots on the back cover.

4. Align your scrapbook pages behind the scrapbook cover so that the left edges are flush together.

5. Mark a dot through each hole on the first page.

6. Punch through several pages at a time, ensuring your hole punch cleanly punches through each page. The number of pages you can punch at a time will depend on type of hole punch you use.

7. Repeat steps 4, 5, and 6 until all pages have been punched.

Tips & Warnings

• While a basic, single hole punch will work for this project, a heavy duty, single hole punch such as the Crop-A-Dile will punch more pages at once.

• Punch your pages before decorating them.

References

• Martha Stewart: Scrapbook Party Project

Resources

• Scrapbooking 101
• Scrapjazz: Scrapbook Basics