Scrapbooking Outside the Album

Honestly, I rarely "scrapbook". I use all my scrapbooking tools and skills to create artwork for myself and others. I even sell some of it from time to time.

I wanted to share the Christmas gifts I created this year for my husband and his children. I made photo collages from a piece of family history for each of them. You might like to try this too. Here's how I did it.

I started with an ancient photo of the Higdon Hotel in Reliance Tennessee that my husband's greatgrand parents owned. That hotel is still in existence on the Hiwassee river and is in the process of being restored. I had my friend, Marty, who restores photos, make a sepia, black & white and color copy of the original. (Marty's website: ) here's what Marty had to work with, I think he did an awesome job restoring this old photograph. Look at the color print he did without any photo reference except a photo I made this past summer of the way the hotel looks now - no gingerbread trim, no windows and much faded paint!

I decided to use the sepia and color copies of the original photo. I took them to Sam's Club and had four 5x7 prints made of each one. Next I used my deckle edged scissors to trim them all a smidgen. Then I ran them through my Xerlon sticker maker and attached them to a brown card stock that was cut just a little bigger than my prints. once these were arranged on the Bainbridge board I had cut to fit my frames, I started to make my embellishments.

I printed the genealogy of Bill's family from grandmother Higdon down to Bill's children. I used plain copy paper for this and added color with chalk and Perfect Pearls and decorated the edges. This was mounted on a chocolate colored handmade paper with distressed edges.

I made a cut out of Grandma Higdon from the original color photo, blew her up so the fan she was holding was vi sable. She was a little grainy because of the size but I didn't mind - I wanted the fan as much as anything and the effect was O.K. I attached her to card stock, and made a name plate to go under the photo.

For a finishing touch I created a little tag for the top corner. I embellished it with a green cord and used paper glaze to raise the letters on the word Family. I framed the whole thing, duplicated it 3 times -one for each child (all grown with families of their own) and wrapped them up!