Picking a scrapbook

Last summer Josie's holiday task was to keep a diary or a scrapbook. We chose scrapbook, and we've been working on it all year.

The first task is to choose a suitable scrapbook. Josie has quite big writing, so I knew I needed quite a large scrapbook. The second consideration was durability. We planned to take the scrapbook with us on holiday, where it would be in and out of bags, and generally thrown around. I also wanted it to last after it was completed, so Josie would have a keepsake in future. Those were my two main criteria, but Josie had one too. It had to be colourful.

We went up to Paperchase to browse their scrapbook selection. They're not the cheapest stationery shop, but they are one of the best for scrapbooks.

Josie was immediately taken with the Spectrascope range, and I was also pretty pleased. The range came in a variety of different size. It met her criteria: colourful pages. It met my criteria of durability: the pages are thick card stock, but they are bound with two thick sheets of protective plastic.

The perspex sheet protects the vulnerable card underneath.

We picked the large scrapbook, 30 pages of multi-coloured card. At £8.50 it was quite expensive, but I thought it was a worthwhile expense.My only issue with it was that the perspex plastic was cloudy, rather than see-through.

As soon as we got home, Josie immediately created a front cover to declare her scrapbook open! I bought a stencil art set as part of the train activity set I was building, in preparation for the long journey to Malvern for summer holidays. We opened them a bit early, and she used these to add to her own text on the front cover. The stencils were a pack from Klutz, which has loads of really good craft kids for children.

Those stencils were a good buy; Santa even used them to decorate the house with snow spray animals for Christmas morning. The only drawback with colourful card is that the art laid directly on the page isn't that vibrant. However, self-made art isn't really the point of a scrapbook.

In the next post, I'll discuss the various different items you can collect and use, and ideas that we came up with for our scrapbook pages. For now, here's the front cover: