If you’re used to creating painted pages, making collages, adding rubber stamp letters, or your own personal hand lettering to your journal pages, you may want to add Scrapbooking to your repertoire. Your pages do not need to be clean, tidy and “for the book” type of pages you may have seen before. You can add pizzazz to your pages and still add photos and create your own unique style of scrapbooking. In fact, now that the recession has affected many of us, people are much more careful about how much we spend on scrapbooking supplies. As a Visual Journaler, you have an advantage as you are already used to using alternative elements to animate your page. Here are some ways to enrich your pages without breaking the bank:

• hammer the bottle caps flat, add a small photo and cover it with Diamond polish, glue it to your page
• save used ticket stubs, receipts, and clothing/ticket tags and use them on your pages; you can add them to the photos that belong to the article, ie. A photo of a new dress along with the decorated price tag.
• Use fabric scraps as a border on your page
• Punch holes in an old fork and glue to the front of an album. This would be especially significant if the album is about eating.
• Use spam with colorful images to spice up a drab page
• candy wrappers can be glued to your creation for a fun metallic look
• wire branches on your page for an outdoor broadcast
• if the sole of your shoe has fallen off, put it on a “travel” page
• crochet a chain with leftover yarn and sew to your page
• attach safety pins on a “daring page”
• Use spray paint on a painted background to smear teens
• make lists on lined paper, tear off the edge and paste
• use tape or scotch tape to attach photos
• Sew a beaded border with leftover beads
• have a drawer of junk, broken and discarded jewelry, incorporate a piece into your feathers or sheets of glue to spread a painted background
• don’t throw away the discarded crepe paper streamers – fan them and glue them to your page
• save some of those lightly used birthday candles and attach them to a birthday quilt
• Create fun backgrounds by cutting your own stamps with Styrofoam meat trays and foam plates. I cut seals off a discarded Spa flip flop once! Apply some folk art paint and stamp your background.
• save the tissue paper from birthday presents, spread glue on its background, glue the tissue while creating wrinkles. This will give you a nice textured background.
• For an offbeat background, create a mosaic background by photocopying your color and black-and-white art, cutting and pasting. You can also add random wallpaper squares that have been splattered, fluffed, scrapped, or stenciled.

There are so many ways to combine Scrapbooking and Visual Journaling to create beautiful and unique scrapbooks. The beauty is that you can do all of this on a budget using the supplies you have on hand!