Review on 🎨 Scraptastic!: 50 Creative Ideas to Enhance Your Scrapbook Pages with Messy, Sparkly, Touch-Feely, and Snazzy Techniques by Summer Hendricks

If you've been reading scrapbooking articles, watching demos, and making scrapbooking books for a while, the style used in this book might be a bit unnerving at first. but that's only because it doesn't look and feel intuitive to the more experienced of us. I've been scrapbooking for a while and don't like creating impersonal digital mockups that waste my printer's ink and empty my pockets. I'm tired of perfect cardboard-on-cardboard rectangles with a little AC Moore flower taped to the corner. This is for the more traditional scrapbooker or for those short on time who just want to be creative in arranging their memories rather than just moving photos into an album. This book is for all of us. What to Expect There are clear, simple instructions for using watercolor paints on Yupo plastic paper, a paper that does not absorb ink but allows it to lie on the surface, producing brighter colors. Imagine your photos against such a background. Use masking tape as a background and paint over it. How about cutting off the petals from those plastic flowers you buy at arts and craft stores or dollar stores? Then glue the petals to the cardboard and paint them with pressure sensitive glue and plaster to give the flowers a sizzling effect in addition to your baby photo? Cut a letter out of the fabric and sew it onto the felt. Use gold leaf on crown-shaped cardstock as a backdrop for your princess. Those of us who love to sew original creations, those of us who love to draw, those of us who have sloppy handwriting but still love our handwriting, those of us who organize the events of our lives on a micro level and need to manage and just want to find a creative way to relieve stress - this is for you. Anyone who is a former art student will also appreciate this book. But you don't have to be a professional artist to try these layouts, they're easy enough for an elementary school student, and with a few exceptions, most of the materials can be found at home. This book definitely isn't for everyone, except that the library and craft stores are crammed with more books for cleaner, more traditional styles of scrapbooking. The only reason I didn't give the book a perfect rating is because of the acid, the photos are fading, turning yellow, partially turning orange. It's real - many of us have seen it. Some of the media suggested in this book are not acid free. I would suggest always gluing the photo - with an acid-free glue - to acid-free cardstock or patterned paper as a buffer between paint, tape, plastic and other media suggested in this book. If you decide to write on the photo, use acid-free pens.