Making your own scrapbook from scratch can be just the thing to do when you cannot find one in the size, colour shape or at the price you are looking for. Let me share a couple of ideas with you.

Making Custom Sized Scrapbooks

When you want an album to be a particular size that is not standard, the stationer or printing shop is your friend. Printing shops carry light to heavy duty card in poster board sizes in a range of colours. They have super cutting machines too and can make you pages to your exact specifications. You may only need one piece of card to make an album with many pages, depending on the size you want to wind up with.

Simply choose your cardboard and ask your printer to cut it to size. Your pages will be exactly the same size and you can then take them home and bind them the way you want to, or you can ask the printer to discuss binding options with you.

You can make quite large albums this way or alternatively, make them almost as small as you like. The possibilities can be endless!

Of course, you can also cut your own pages from cardstock at home with your personal cutter or guillotine.

By making your album this way, you can determine the number and colour or texture of every page.

Binding Your Own Album

Binding your scrapbook pages together at home can be as simple as punching holes in the edges of the pages and putting some book binding rings or large brads through the holes. There are a number of other options though such as:

1. Binding the pages together with string, yarn, wire, leather or stitching (by hand or machine)
2. Stapling the edges together
3. Binding the pages with plastic combs and a home binding machine
4. Scoring the pages a distance from the spine and binding them together with another piece of strong card shaped to the book and glued in with bookbinding glue

Using book binding rings allows you to decorate the spine of your album even further by tying ribbons and other textiles to the rings, adding in charms or threaded buttons and so on.

Another way to make the spine unique and beautiful is to use your Bigshot dies to make a uniquely crafted book binding cover, especially for a smaller album. Just choose your cardstock (I have used cardstock with a different coloured core before to great effect) and run it through your Bigshot with an embossing folder. Once you have embossed it, sand the raised edges of the embossing. Now cut your book binder to shape. Fold it in half lengthwise and fit it to your album.

You can also decorate the corners or edges of the binding with punches. Place your decorated cardstock over the top of your bound edges to hide the binding method, or you can punch the decorated edge as well and then bind it together as you wish.

Shaping Chipboard Albums

Did you know you can shape chipboard to suit your own purpose? With patience you can cut even thick chipboard through with a craft knife by steadily cutting it in layers.

Say you wanted to make a heart shaped album but could not find one in the shops. Use a square or oblong chipboard album instead. Take the album apart if it is bound with book rings and place the first page on your craft mat. Trace or draw the shape you want on the chipboard (in this case, draw on your heart shape). Now take your craft knife and carefully score around the shape. Do not try to cut all the way through the chipboard on the first go. Repeatedly cut along the lines of the heart with your craft knife until you have cut through all the layers of your chipboard page. Use a firm, even pressure to cut as pushing too hard on the knife may result in the blade getting stuck in the chipboard and mistakes being made.

Now use the cut page as a template to draw your shape on the other pages and cut them out with your craft knife as before.

I usually sand the edges of my chipboard to take away any rough spots, erase my drawing lines and to prepare the chipboard for painting, inking, gluing etc.

Just think! You could make the page is the shape of initials, a word, a house, a bug, an animal, or any other shape you wish! You can have your own unique albums this way.

Making your own albums from scratch or customising the shape can open a whole other world of possibilities for scrapbooking. I hope it has for you!