Written by our roving writer in Greenville, S.C.
Summer vacations, weddings, childhood memories?. There are so many milestones you want to capture and relive again and again. For this reason, scrapbooking has emerged as a beloved hobby for many people over the last decade. Now, as you prepare for a major milestone in your life ? your graduation day – it’s your turn to create lasting memories with colorful and eye-catching graduation scrapbook pages.
Photographs
With a digital camera in hand, you don’t need to be selective about the photos you take. After all, you can always delete pics and replace them with better choices when your memory card fills up. Be daring! Bold! Silly! And try to include everyone in your photos, not just your best friends. Sure, a few formal, posed pictures are perfect for posterity, but they won’t necessarily capture the true spirit of graduation day.
Allow extra time to get ready and snap impromptu shots of your friends while they try to secure their graduation caps or anxiously linger on line while administrators sort and single-file your graduating class. These are ideal behind-the-scenes photo opportunities that will have you laughing, maybe even crying, years later.
Be sure to save or print duplicates of your favorite snapshots so you can cut them and arrange them in your scrapbook pages. Don’t forget that you can share photos with your friends and encourage them share with you. By doing this, you’ll find that you’ll have more photos than time to sort through them all!
Memory Box
Have you been shooting lots of photographs as graduation day approaches? Well, photos aren’t the only things you’ll want to collect to help create graduation memories. Although essential for personalization, photos are only one component of your scrapbook. Here are some other items you can include on your scrapbook pages: ~Things to find:
It’s time to rummage around and collect tokens from senior year before they get lost during this hectic time. They may be under your bed, in the trunk of your car, or at the bottom of the bookbag you’re preparing to toss when school is officially over. Letters from friends are great items to convey a feeling or recap an event on your scrapbook page. If you don’t want to store your originals, or the entire letter, in your scrapbook simply photocopy the letter and use the duplicate for your pages. Your memory box is a great permanent storage container for original mementos. Prom invitations, prom napkins, your dried corsage, and other small items from prom night are an easy way to fill scrapbook pages as well.
Did you win an award for best creative writer, perfect attendance, or MVP during your senior year? If so, include the certificate, gold medal, or award in your scrapbook to remind yourself of your accomplishments. Did you receive any written commendations from teachers this year? What about a copy of the letter of recommendation your guidance counselor wrote on your behalf? Allow yourself a few moments to reflect and think back to anything else you want to remember about senior year; then, ask yourself what item you possess that encapsulates that memory? If it’s small enough to fit on a scrapbook page, find it!
Things to remember:
Try to save all small mementos related to your graduation day. What seems trivial at the moment may serve as a great memory years from now. This is the perfect opportunity to enlist the help of your mom or other family member. Just ask them to bring with them to graduation a small bag to collect items you hand them before and after the ceremony. Your tassel is the quintessential memory of your graduation ceremony, and there’s no better place to showcase it than in your graduation scrapbook. But what about the greeting cards you receive from friends and family? You may also be handed a rose or carnation before you enter the auditorium for the ceremony. Of course, one of the most important items you must remember to save is your graduation program agenda. There may be a speech or poem included that you can later enlarge and create a scrapbook page around.
Arrange your Materials
Once the big day is over, you can relax and enjoy your summer. Set a few hours aside to scan through your memory box and decide which items you want to use. If you feel you’re missing something important, seek it out or find an item that invokes the same feeling. Organize your pictures and link them to items you’ve stored in your memory box, placing them in chronological order when possible. Store these items in separate plastic baggies or folders.
Choose a Theme
Some of the best scrapbook pages boast individual themes. Each page can illustrate a theme such as “love,” “best friends,” “anxiety,” “growing pains,” “last minute changes,” and “a night to remember.” You may find it easiest to start a page with photographs and then add mementos as they relate to the pics. Now is a good time to cut your photographs and other paper items. Try experimenting with some of the many crafting scissors which give paper a unique decorative edge, and avoid placing too many photos on one page. Consider selecting one object to illustrate your theme and build a page around it. For example, a large heart can be the center of your “love” scrapbook page while a tree with long limbs can represent a page with the theme of “growing pains.” You are only limited by your imagination!
Select a Color Scheme
Choose soft, pastel colors as a background for romantically themed pages and bold colors for pages that illustrate moments of high tension or excitement. Yellow is a traditional color for friendship while red is representative of romantic love. Your background material can be as simple as construction paper, gift wrap, or wallpaper and should provide a subtlThings to find:
It’s time to rummage around and collect tokens from senior year before they get lost during this hectic time. They may be under your bed, in the trunk of your car, or at the bottom of the bookbag you’re preparing to toss when school is officially over. Letters from friends are great items to convey a feeling or recap an event on your scrapbook page. If you don’t want to store your originals, or the entire letter, in your scrapbook simply photocopy the letter and use the duplicate for your pages. Your memory box is a great permanent storage container for original mementos. Prom invitations, prom napkins, your dried corsage, and other small items from prom night are an easy way to fill scrapbook pages as well.
Did you win an award for best creative writer, perfect attendance, or MVP during your senior year? If so, include the certificate, gold medal, or award in your scrapbook to remind yourself of your accomplishments. Did you receive any written commendations from teachers this year? What about a copy of the letter of recommendation your guidance counselor wrote on your behalf? Allow yourself a few moments to reflect and think back to anything else you want to remember about senior year; then, ask yourself what item you possess that encapsulates that memory? If it’s small enough to fit on a scrapbook page, find it!
Things to remember:
Try to save all small mementos related to your graduation day. What seems trivial at the moment may serve as a great memory years from now. This is the perfect opportunity to enlist the help of your mom or other family member. Just ask them to bring with them to graduation a small bag to collect items you hand them before and after the ceremony. Your tassel is the quintessential memory of your graduation ceremony, and there’s no better place to showcase it than in your graduation scrapbook. But what about the greeting cards you receive from friends and family? You may also be handed a rose or carnation before you enter the auditorium for the ceremony. Of course, one of the most important items you must remember to save is your graduation program agenda. There may be a speech or poem included that you can later enlarge and create a scrapbook page around.
Arrange your Materials
Once the big day is over, you can relax and enjoy your summer. Set a few hours aside to scan through your memory box and decide which items you want to use. If you feel you’re missing something important, seek it out or find an item that invokes the same feeling. Organize your pictures and link them to items you’ve stored in your memory box, placing them in chronological order when possible. Store these items in separate plastic baggies or folders.
Choose a Theme
Some of the best scrapbook pages boast individual themes. Each page can illustrate a theme such as “love,” “best friends,” “anxiety,” “growing pains,” “last minute changes,” and “a night to remember.” You may find it easiest to start a page with photographs and then add mementos as they relate to the pics. Now is a good time to cut your photographs and other paper items. Try experimenting with some of the many crafting scissors which give paper a unique decorative edge, and avoid placing too many photos on one page. Consider selecting one object to illustrate your theme and build a page around it. For example, a large heart can be the center of your “love” scrapbook page while a tree with long limbs can represent a page with the theme of “growing pains.” You are only limited by your imagination!
Select a Color Scheme
Choose soft, pastel colors as a background for romantically themed pages and bold colors for pages that illustrate moments of high tension or excitement. Yellow is a traditional color for friendship while red is representative of romantic love. Your background material can be as simple as construction paper, gift wrap, or wallpaper and should provide a subtl