If you have already tackled scrapbooks in the past, then you may want to celebrate your marriage by creating another scrapbook – this one could tell your personal love story in a combination of pictures, journaling, and memorabilia. Of course, this task will be a little more ambitious, so you might not want to try it if you don't have scrapbooking experience.

Getting Started on Your Personal Love Story

First, you should gather all of the photographs you want to use. Go back to your first meeting, your early dates, etc. Remember you want to show your growing love story as it unfolded through time, so the more pictures you have the better. If you don't have all of the pictures you want, consider paying a visit to friends and family members to raid their photo albums. You can usually make copies of photographs fairly easily.

As far as pictures go, you might even want to include baby pictures or photos from both of your childhoods to see how far you've come. Of course, you'll want to raid your wedding albums and your honeymoon pictures for some of the best examples of your happy new life together.

After you've collected all of the pictures, try to find pieces of memorabilia. Movie tickets, petals from a corsage, postcards, airplane tickets, love notes, gift tags, wedding napkins, a wedding invitation, the engagement clipping, and more are examples of good pieces of memorabilia you can add to the scrapbook.

As you gather memorabilia, remember you can include it in your scrapbook in two ways. Small pieces can be added directly to the appropriate pages. For example, your airplane tickets from your honeymoon could be added to one of the pages from your honeymoon. You can also include a special pocket in the scrapbook for larger pieces of memorabilia that you want to keep with the pictures.

Staying Organized

Because this scrapbook is ambitious, your best bet is to work on different sections of the book at a time. That means you may want to gather supplies for each section separately. For example, you may want to buy wedding-related embellishments, such as wedding cake stickers or satin ribbons, for the section of the scrapbook containing your wedding pictures. You may also want to choose different colored paper for each section which would help to keep the parts separate until you can add in section dividers.

When you do begin adding the photographs to your scrapbook, don't hesitate to be creative. For example, you could glue one picture to a sheet of paper, then using a stencil cut out a heart shape from a second piece of paper. When the second sheet is placed over the first, the heart serves as a frame for the other picture. You can duplicate this idea with other shapes – stencils are available in tons of designs.

Another idea is to add embossing to the pages of your scrapbook. To do embossing, you need a rubber stamp, embossing powder, and a heating source special tools are available or you can use an iron. You should experiment with embossing on different types of paper first because the effects will change. Practice quite a bit before you add the effect to your actual scrapbook.

Journaling: A Nice Touch to Your Scrapbook

Don't forget to add journaling to all or most of the pages. This in itself will be a major project, but it will be worth it. Years from now when you look back at the scrapbook you'll want to know why you included the pictures you've chosen. Of course, you also want the journaling to look nice. That's why some scrapbookers actually do their journaling on computers, instead of hand-writing it. If you prefer to handwrite your entries, consider buying some vellum. When you do your writing, you can write directly on the vellum while you hold it on to lined paper that way you can write in straight lines. Then, place your vellum on other colored paper to create different background effects, just make sure the writing is always legible.

Besides journaling, you should also include a table of contents for your scrapbook, especially since its going to be so large. Add embellishments to the table of contents so it grabs the viewer's attention immediately. You could use stencils to write the words. Leave room on the page though so you can continue adding sections to your love story.

And that brings us to another part of your scrapbook. Even after you've completed your wedding and honeymoon sections, you should leave room for more pages. Imagine being able to add sections about buying your first home together, celebrating your first anniversary, or expanding your family with children and pets. In this way, your scrapbook will become an ongoing project you can keep adding to after every significant moment in your life together.