How to Create Family Heritage Keepsakes With Scrapbooking
Scrapbooking can be a great family activity that teaches family members about their shared history while preserving treasured keepsakes for future generations. Small mementos can be added along with pictures and written recollections to tell the story of your family.Your scrapbook will become a treasured item for years to come. Organizing and properly preserving your mementos are important factors to consider so your family's story is told cohesively and will last for a long time.
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Things You'll Need
- Scrapbook
- Blank pages
- Photos, documents and other mementos
- Adhesives
- Stickers, stamps, decorative paper and other decorative elements
Instructions
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Choose your mementos, photos, documents and small keepsakes that you would like to add to your scrapbook. Having these items in front of you allows you to organize your pages before beginning so you can see what preservation is needed on certain items.
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Arrange your items by page. Pages can focus on one particular family member, a family event like a wedding or birth, or a broader theme like memories of beach vacations you took every year as a child. The organization for the book as a whole can also run along these themes: the life of your grandmother, your children's weddings or a chronological history of your family with each page focusing on a different decade or year.
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Choose paper, stickers, stamps and other details to compliment your theme. If you've chosen the birth of a baby as the theme of your page you may have mementos like photos, hospital bracelets, ribbons and cards. Additional elements can be found at most major craft or scrapbook supply stores from stork stamps to baby boy blue background paper.
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Have a dry run by arranging the page before gluing. Place your mementos, photos and other elements as you want them to appear on the page before gluing anything down. This gives you the chance to find the perfect layout before gluing something in the wrong place and potentially damaging it.
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Glue your items down one at a time. Different glues work wonderfully for different elements. Most craft and scrapbook supply stores offer a variety of adhesives from stronger bonding agents that work well with heavier elements like keys to acid-free options for delicate older pictures.
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Allow your page to dry completely and then add to your scrapbook. Always make sure your glue has dried completely on a flat surface to avoid warping the page or shifting the items. One the glue is fully set you can add the page to your scrapbook and move on to making your next memory page.
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Tips & Warnings
For very special scrapbook pages, you can frame them and hang them around the house where they can be enjoyed by all your visitors.
Have your family members write down their recollections about certain events that can be preserved with your scrapbook page. Future generations will enjoy reading in his own words what your grandfather was feeling on his wedding day or what your great-grandmother remembers about immigrating.
For extremely delicate pictures and mementos use extreme caution and research the best way to preserve them. Everything from the type of paper to the type of ink will effect how best to preserve a memento or picture so there are no hard and fast rules that work well for every keepsake. Research what your memento specifically needs.
References
Resources
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