Collages and Mosaics

Most of my "regular" pages have two to four photos and show the background page. Collage and mosaic pages have many more photos that virtually cover the page. For me, a collage contains photos that overlap at odd angles, and often include other paper "ephymera." A mosaic has photos in a specific pattern that "fit" together. No particular event seems most appropriate for a mosaic -- except that it has to be an event or a subject with lots of photos !

Making a mosaic is very similar to assembling a jigsaw puzzle or a patchwork quilt. I need a stack of photos to move around the page and select those that "fit" together. Trimming has to be done very carefully. Too much trimming and the photo is too small for its space. Any text can fit in its own rectangle, but I often skip the text box and just use a title box.

Almost all my mosaics are composed of different size rectangles with an occassional square. I made a few with different sized curved pieces. I have seen some mosiac pages in scrapbook magazines that are composed of one inch (or two inch) squares of different photographs. I have yet to figure out how to get my photos to fit into those patterns, but I am watching.

Six months of blogging, six years of scrapbooking

Blogging has made me think about my scrapbooking processes: not only what I do, but why I do it the way that I do. For six months I have posted my methods and described how I assembled some of my favorite pages.

Do I have more experiences to share ? Oh yes, I do. Out of my six years of scrapbooks, some of my favorite aspects of scrapbooking that I will describe next include:

• pages that feature mosaics of photographs.
• reworking and updating lay-outs.
• pages and scrapbooks of vintage photographs and "family trees." My mother's family and my husband's mother's family have photographs that date back into the 1880's for me to organize and scrapbook. We also have photos from our parents' pre-children lives.
• starting a scrapbook of my own "pre-children" life.
• scrapbooking our postage stamp collections.
• deciding what to scrapbook and when
• my topics for a 8x8 scrapbook rather than my usual 8 1/2 x 11 size.

As I spent this three day week-end cleaning and organizing my craft half of the laundry room, I also have given quite a bit of thought recently on these topics:

• tools that I bought and never used (or used once and twice and never again)
• organizing my paper supply

I'll post again soon as soon as I decide which topic to discuss next.