Scrapbooking on a Budget

Scrapbooking can be expensive if you buy everything premade.  Here's a few tips on how to cut down on cost.  The main tools you will need are scissors, an X-acto knife, glue sticks, and your photos and memorabilia.  Always check out your local dollar store, you'll be surprised at what you can find to decorate your pages. 

• Buy cardstock when it's on sale.  I don't recommend going to Michael's or Joanne Fabrics unless you have coupons there because they are really expensive.  Check out stores such as Target, Meijer, Walmart, and K-mart.  This is a great deal on a 48-sheet pad of patterned cardstock and will last you a while.  You can make your own cutouts from stencils you find online rather than buying premade packaged cutouts.

In addition to the inexpensive paper here, I added my own drawings of balloons in the background.

•  To fasten your photos and other things to the page, look for gold brads at the dollar store and paint them with nail polish instead of buying the different colored brads at a craft store.  During holidays I like to go the day after and stock up on discounted ribbon and whatever else I can find.

• Buy punchouts and stamps, each one is an investment that can be used over and over.  I have the basic punchouts such as hearts, snowflakes, and stars.  Here you get 12 punchouts for only $20! That's a great deal and well worth it.  Stamps with different patterns can be used over and over as well.  

Here's a close up of a page I made for my mother as a birthday gift.  I layered three sheets of different paper behind the picture and made little gold hearts with my heart punchout to put all over the page.  If you punchout the shapes in a line on a sheet of paper, you've also just made a punchout border so you don't have to waste that paper.  
 

 

Above are two simple inexpensive pages made for my mom.  The frames were on sale for $10 and you'll most likely have to go to a craft store to find them.  It looks like a lot of work for these pages but all I did was layer patterned paper behind the photos.  The lettering is printed out on a computer, cut up, and glued.

Cassie Crawford has a great serious on YouTube for scrapbooking on a budget, check out and subscribe to her channel BigCraftLittleBudget for great tips on saving money on your papercrafting needs.

This is probably the simplest page I've created, with word pattered paper for the background and black cardstock behind the photos with a couple stickers I found on sale.

Here, it looks like a lot is going on, but the only thing I did to make it stand out was color the background paper!  Sure it was tedious and took a little time, but adding the pops of color throughout the page makes it much more exciting.

Do you have any tips and tricks to scrapbooking on a budget?  What's your favorite go to trick to make your pages stand out?