Plain and simple, if you are spending hundreds of dollars on embellishments, stickers and artwork for your scrapbooks, then you are literally throwing your money away on unnecessary costs.  Acid-free seems to be a buzz word that keeps people inside scrapbooking stores and craft shops looking for all the perfect adornments, yet there is such an easier way to get your pages looking bright and professional.

First of all, I scrapbook and do so by the hours. I have a lifetime of photographs to get organized and onto pages. I do my share of shopping and buying from all sorts of scrapbook stores, auctions and craft stores.  However, I also spend just as much time at flea markets and antique shows buying as much vintage paper as I can find. 

I'm absolutely convinced that if you try my way of scrapbooking, you will not only begin to save money, you will have so much more fun with your art. You can create some of the most unique looks and be the envy of your scrapbooking friends.

I don't stop with scrapbooking though, I make my own greeting cards using vintage paper. I look for that dirty postcard selling for a nickel, I cut it up, matte around it and pretty soon a card appears.  Old photographs are so much fun to use, too.

Really this guide isn't very long, its just to guide you in the right direction. Start using vintage paper for scrapbooking.  It is cheap, so much cheaper than the current offerings. If you can buy a box lot of postcards for $20 and you cut and paste for a year out of that box, you are saved probably hundreds of dollars.  I keep a little sticker maker machine handy and once I've cut out a flower or a face or even letters, I run it through the sticker machine and put it on a page or a card. 

The victorians created some of the most beautiful scrapbooks and their work is highly collected today. Many scrapbooks earn $800- $1,000 dollars at auction. Do you know what they made those scrapbooks with at the time ? - they were using old tradecards, business cards, advertising cards that someone would have thrown away if it had not  been put into an album.  They used homemade paste, flour and water and that is why those pages can be soaked and the cards lifted off so easily. Once the items are dried, those trade cards and other pieces of paper sell fro $5 to $25 each. The value is in the item being advertised, the artist work of the card, the absolute beauty of the work.  Can you imagine your scrapbook one day bringing $1,000 at auction.  I wonder if some of those teenage girls spending their winter months with a jar of paste and their mother's throwaways ever dreamed their "scraps" would be so valuable.

Today we are creating beautiful scrapbooks but we are paying a dear price for our pages. Off set the cost by starting to find box lots of paper, whether modern or vintage and using all the treasures you will find in those boxes. 

Here is one idea. We have a relative - a banker.  It seems he was destined to be a banker because almost every picture we have of him, he stands with money. His first check, his first pay stuf, his first bank account and on the list goes.  There is even a picture of him at his wedding writing a check to the minister !  Now, we found a shoebox full of cancelled checks and we have used those to embellish all the pages of him with money. It has made some truly unique pages and he treasures that scrapbook. The cancelled checks were from all sorts of banks across the county so he even gets a bit of history with each page.

Use victorian scraps to illustrate a point, two friends in a picture, two children on a postcard become the illustration for a lasting friendship. 

Use vintage postcards as the centerpiece of a greeting card. You can't go wrong with the bright images and the unique look.

A sweet peek at two friends sharing a moment might be just the memory needed on a page. The heartfelt sentiment of Thank You, lets you know the friendship is important and the old friends embellishment seems to bring out the joy. The vintage papers on this page are the couple in the winter scene cut from a dingy postcard, then the dark green paper is some old cardstock found in a printer's shop with a box full of other colors.  Total costs for putting this page together, including those Thank You stickers ( we found at a yard sale) .. $1.25.

Sometimes we cut out the sentiments inside an old greeting card, use just a phrase or a picture from the card and use it to get the point across. The old friends used on this page actually came attached to a Christmas tag a few years ago.

This is a greeting card front and inside.  On the front an Edwardian postcard that cost 25 cents has had its torn corners cropped off and placed on a handdrawn flower. The flower is cardstock from that printer's shop. Inside we put a photo of a girl - no one we know- just a photo we got in a box full of old photos from an estate. We put our timeless beauty sticker on the inside and wrote our note.  Total cost for this greeting card : $.75. 

If you enjoy scrapbooking as much as I do, you know sometimes the well just runs dry and finding pages to use for examples can be time consuming.  The next time you go to a yard sale, a flea market, estate sale or even to the thrift store, don't pass by that box of forlorn paper that looks like it will never be useful again. Take it home and take our your scissors and start having some fun and cheap therapy.

You can not even imagine what you can do with calendars !  We have an entire scrapbook that matches the calendar date or year with the pictures. It's so much fun to remember with that scrapbook.

You can save more money to purchase those very nice stamps and fancy embellishments you need to make the perfect page and if you will spend a little time creating from what you already have or that really unique find at the flea market.

We love the beauty of paper and the history it holds. We hope you have enjoyed learning just one more way to use vintage paper.