Scrapbooking Tips: Low Quality Photos and Paper Scraps

Although I am working to improve the quality of my photographs, I still have several photographs that I want to include in my albums that are far from worthy of taking stage on my layouts.  In fact the photograph on the layout immediately below was cut from a Polaroid.  I learned that you should never cut up your Polaroids long after I had already cut most of mine, years ago.

However, these photographs have stories to tell, (which are almost always told on the back of my layouts). The mother and son in the layout below were close friends when I was a child.  We share common heritage, (Norwegian), and I called the mother Aunt in Norwegian, (Tante), the way many children in my generation called some of our parents closest friends. I don't have many pictures of them and no additional ones from the 70's.  

There are a few other reasons this photograph is special to me.  For one, the picture window in the background is the crime scene from my Apache story, (link to story included).  The lamp and tables are heirloom pieces that now bless my current home.  Lastly, the dog in the photograph was one that we had for a few years.  I named him, Mandy, and I could write a nice little story about my adventures with that little ragamuffin!  

This picture has so many stories that I can tell.  Just looking at it brings on a slew of memories.  This is why I find ways to fit them on a page when otherwise they may seem unworthy.

 I struggled with a title for this post because there were so many different points that I thought valuable to discuss. One of which was that I scraplifted myself .  I chose two layouts from my November projects and created two projects for December.  The designs seemed a natural solution when I found myself with very little paper left. If you think a certain style works well for you, I find that it adds some uniformity to your albums when you replicate your work.

The photograph below is from my last Christmas with my parents together. They divorced shortly thereafter.  The photograph itself looked horrible! It had spent too many years in the old magnetic albums with high acid content.  It was very yellowed around the edges and my family was crookedly placed in the center.  The faux Polaroid frame was an excellent solution.

The photographs hold their very own stories.  In each case of these four pages, a picture tells a thousand words.  Our poor quality photographs need to come out of hiding and take center stage.  And, isn't it a wonderful solution when we can take our scraps of papers and leftovers from our kits and fashion them together in some artistic way to create beauty out of ashes?

The two Christmas pages were created mostly with the December 2015 Simple Stories Claus and Co. line from The ScrapRoom Kits, and a couple items from my stash.  The other two pages were made from November 2015 kits from The ScrapRoom.