Crafts, especially unique and interesting ones, never go out of style. These also never run out of loyal followers. One very good proof of this is the continuous popularity of both cross stitching and knitting. Up to this day, these types of crafts still count thousands, if not millions, of devoted practitioners all over the world.

These days, another emerging type of craft is gaining ground – scrapbooking. Craft aficionados, especially those who love visually appealing products, have started to promote this. What makes scrapbooking interesting for a lot of aficionados is the fact that you can insert your personal style without any limitations.

Scrapbooking is a hobby wherein a person preserves photographs, cards, tickets and other symbols of memories in a very creative and unique way. A practitioner, usually called a “scrapbooker," protects and presents these symbols of memories through various themes, which may range from holidays to events to describing how it was like then. For instance, a mother may preserve memories of her newborn by preparing a single scrapbook spread with at least two photographs embellished with cut-outs, stickers and perhaps tags found on the baby’s crib at the hospital. As you can see, the idea is to make the photographs more meaningful and more unique compared to just placing them in regular photo albums.

If you want to start developing your scrapbooking abilities, here are a few tips and ideas you may want to consider for your projects:

1. Use your favorite quotes and perhaps samplings of your diary as embellishments. Give your spread a personal touch by inserting your favorite motto printed in a nice, fancy font.

2. To give emphasis to the name of a person whose photos you want to preserve, you can make one or two letters bigger than all the rest. Alternatively, you can print one or two letters using a different font or a different color.

3. Go for the 3D effect! Arrange pictures in such a way that the end result will be a cool 3 dimensional effect.

4. Scan or insert actual tickets, menus, stubs or tags. If you’re doing a photo diary of your recent travel to the U.S., for instance, saving and inserting the actual train tickets and airplane flight booking papers can add pizzazz to your project.

5. Use personalized templates. If you want to preserve photos of your family’s first ever trip to the beach, you may want to use a background full of seashells, beach balls, slippers and sand.

You can also go to supplies stores or hobby shops to purchase ready-to-assemble scrapbooking kits. These kits usually contain ribbons, craft thickers, vellum quote stacks, rickracks and perhaps buttons and kitchen paper. You can use them based on the instructions based on the kit or add more embellishments. Just don’t overdo it though!

On the other hand, you could first try your hand on scrapbooking via free scrapbooking software programs. Two free scrapbooking softwares which you can use are Picaboo and Scrapbook Flair.

Features of these two are basically the same – you can add personalized backgrounds to your spread, you can frame your digital pictures with stylish corners, you can come up with a photo collage and you can instantly create a 3D effect.

Given these, one can truly see why people are getting hooked with scrapbooking. It’s a hobby where a person can exercise creativity, thought and imagination on meaningful projects.