Making Scrapbooks: Complete Guide to Preserving Your Treasured Memories - Hardcover

With the emphasis on embellishment, Making Scrapbooks presents 75 projects for jazzing up your memory albums (covers as well as interiors) with pop-ups, fancy cutouts, textural adornments, and theme-appropriate artwork and memorabilia. Using all the tricks of the trade--templates, decorative-edge scissors, stencils, stamps, stickers, ribbons, lace, and more--Vanessa-Ann stocks her albums with cute and clever ideas for pages of pictures of babies, pets, holidays, school events, weddings, and ancestors. Many of the projects would also work well as greeting cards or framed presentations. At times the photos are a bit overwhelmed by the decorations, but the ideas are fun and plentiful. --Amy Handy

Books with creative formats and artistic bindings have always been a specialty of small presses, but now the computer printer enables anyone to make distinctive-looking books. These three volumes are full of ideas and techniques for compiling and binding handmade books in many formats, including "memory books" and personalized scrapbooks. Blake (Making and Decorating Your Own Paper, Sterling, 1995) deals mainly with the mechanics of making covers and bindings. Graphic designer Kropper goes beyond this into hand-decorated pages, unusual formats, and traditional methods such as fore-edge painting. The Vanessa-Ann book is for makers of memory books and includes projects combining photographs and keepsakes with cutout mountings and simple bindings. All three books are good additions to public library collections, complementing one another rather than overlapping.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.