by Jane Pinder
Last month we started out with some of the scrapbooking basics. Now it is time to take another step. By now you should have your summer photographs sorted and be ready to make a reminder of that special holiday or day out. This time I thought I’d talk you through my process of making these pages. As scrapbooking is a very personal thing, the hope is that the thinking behind these pages may help you with planning your own pages. I do hope you find it useful!
I have done this double page spread of a trip Noel and I made to the top of the Jungfrau in Switzerland. We stayed at the beautiful hotel, on the second page, which was literally at the foot of the Eiger! The trip was amazing and I really wanted to add something about it to my collection of scrapbook pages. However, I didn’t want to do anything too extravagant as the pictures really needed to take pride of place on the pages. So the first thing I did was to gather together a selection of photographs that might be suitable. As the trip up the mountain was made by train I also used a die cut railway track as the left hand border. The border on the right hand side is the off-cut from the railway line! I had kept the tickets and the timetable as I just knew they would be useful! My choice of page paper was determined by the fact that this one matched perfectly the ice of the glacier at the top of the mountain! All that remained was to select a couple of rubber stamps that worked well with the theme, just in case I needed to fill in any spaces. Here I chose the Artifacts Compass F039, and the Vintage Tickets F038. Getting everything together is, I think, the hardest part of scrapbooking. Whatever your theme or topic, you need to give careful thought to all the elements you plan to use. It is all too easy to get it wrong! Having said that, what might look wrong to one person, looks perfect to another, so perhaps wrong is not the right word. Perhaps out of balance or uncoordinated might be better choices. Once you have all your bits and pieces in front of you, the next thing is to play with their positioning. Take plenty of time over this part and try several designs before you settle on the final one. I laid it all out about ten times before I made a decision! Several cups of tea were drunk as I left my worktable before going back to see if it still looked right!  Having placed things where I wanted them, the next step was to try and bring the page together, rather than leave it as pictures just stuck on a page.  The railway track was cut from black card, so I decided to mount the ticket in the top left on a piece of the same card. At first I have each of the photographs mounted separately on pieces of black card, but that just looked too bitty. So I decided to attach them at angles onto one piece of card and then trim around them as a whole, leaving a narrow border of black card around the edges. This seemed to work well. The picture of the train in the bottom left corner I trimmed to leave the front of the train ‘coming out’ of the picture, just for a bit of added interest. The three other photographs on this page are all tied in with the train ride up and inside the Eiger and Jungfrau. Once I had mounted everything it was time to attach them to the page itself!  The other page shows pictures of where we stayed, the magical North Face of the Eiger and the amazing building at The Top of Europe! The map was taken from the timetable and shows the entire region. It is important to collect all sorts of things from your trips. It’s all very well using ready-made embellishments that can be bought, but the pages are so much more meaningful if they contain items you have gathered yourself.  Next I needed to add some titles and journaling. The title at the top of the railway track I took from the timetable. If you don’t have anything like this, you can always die cut letters or ever hand write a title for the page!  For the captions to the photographs I decided to use a handwriting font on the computer as it is a lot easier to read than my own writing! I fiddled around with the layout of the words until I had something that I both liked and that fitted in the spaces that were left!  The central picture on the first page was taken out of a window that has been cut into the North Face of the Eiger. As I looked out, a frayed rope swung into view – hence the caption to this one! The whole point of scrapbook pages is to make you smile as you remember your special times. There were still a few gaps here and there, so these I filled with images of the Compass and Vintage Tickets that I stamped with a grey ink as I didn’t want them to dominate the pages. All that remains now is to add them to my ever-growing scrapbook of memories and to share them with my family when they visit. I hope this helps a little when you are planning your pages. If you are doing some pages of your own, don’t forget to photograph them and we can start a gallery of your scrapbook pages! 
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Japanese Lace Paper Set
