Crucial Elements for a beach layout

Now that you’ve just returned from a fabulous beach vacation and have taken loads of pictures, are you thinking about creating a beach themed scrapbook? There are great background designs to choose from – chalkboard packages are top downloads for this theme.

Here are five crucial elements that will help you design great beach scrapbook layouts for an album that you’ll treasure for many years to come.

ELEMENT #1 BE SELECTIVE

By carefully choosing your photos, you can create breath-taking scrapbooking beach layouts.

It may sound hard at first, but as you begin to sort through your beach photos, create a pile of 20 to 30 photos that you absolutely want to include in your beach themed scrapbook.

You might have taken 20 beautiful sunset photos, but you’ll need to choose just one or two of them for your album.  The kids may have built several sand castles, but just a couple of pictures will be needed for the album.

ELEMENT #2 THINK SUB-THEMES

If you were to make a list of the top ten favourite things about your beach vacation, what would you choose? The sunsets? Kids swimming?  Seeing a dolphin in the far distance? Diving through the waves? Collecting seashells? Let these favourite activities become the sub-themes for your beach themed scrapbook.

ELEMENT #3 BE CREATIVE WITH LAYOUTS

Begin each layout by choosing your backgrounds. Most craft stores will have several beach themed backgrounds to choose from. Keeping your photos and sub-themes in mind, have fun selecting background paper that will support each sub-theme. You’ll find paper that looks like sand or waves, pages with seagulls or starfish, and even paper that has tiny beach pails and shovels.

To give you an idea of scrapbooking beach layouts, here are a few ideas:

Kids playing in the sand. Start out with a sandy background. Along the bottom third of the page add a layer of water paper. Cut the paper with decorative scissors to cause a wavy effect. Mat each photo with blue matting. For a clever title, use die-cut letters for “Beach Fun”. Paint the letters in a beige colour and use a blue marker to create waves along the bottom of each letter. Accent the page with stickers of sand toys, such as a beach pail and shovel.

Make it personal. Did your husband have a romantic moment and wrote “I (Heart) You” in the sand? Hopefully you took a photo of it! Enlarge the photo and use it along the bottom of your page. For the background, use a sunset themed paper. Include a photo of the two of you walking along the beach. Accent the page with a heart shaped border.

Utilize a postcard. Use your favourite beach postcard as a start of your layout.  Include a photo of you and other family members at the beach. Adhere a “thought bubble” to each person and journal a thought that expresses how the person felt about being on vacation. For the page title, use large letters to spell out the name of the beach.

Make a grid. If you have several unique photos of one theme, such as various seashells, fish, or waves, crop twelve photos to a 3×3 size and create a grid collage out of the photos. Use a pre-printed grid or draw one with a ruler and pencil. Leave a quarter inch space between the pictures. The only thing you’ll need to add to the page is a title.

ELEMENT #4 JOURNAL YOUR EXPERIENCE

Although there aren’t any set rules regarding scrapbook journaling, usually the fewer the words the better. As someone flips through your scrapbook, they want to be able to read the information quickly and enjoy the photos. Instead of using full sentences, you might want to just use descriptive words. For example, if you have a photo of your two children building a sand castle, you might write, “Zach & Bri…fun, together, laughter.” Let the photos do most of the “speaking”.

If you have a funny photo of a family member, such as a photo of your husband snoozing on his towel at the beach, write something funny. Let your journaling capture what is truly happening in each picture.

ELEMENT #5 INCLUDE EMBELLISHMENTS

Whether you use tokens from your trip or other items, embellish each of your beach scrapbooking pages.

Chances are that you have souvenirs from your beach vacation that will add a lot of charm to your album, such as:

• Postcards
• Grains of sand
• Tiny seashells
• Ticket stubs
• A napkin with the name of a restaurant stamped on it

Include some of these souvenirs, along with beach-themed stickers, confetti and cut-outs as ways to enhance each page.

Incorporate these beach themed scrapbook ideas and you’ll be guaranteed a good beach layout! You’ll find yourself pouring through the scrapbook album many times and reliving your beach vacation.