Hi, I am Suzanne McCeney and I’m here at ScrapbooksPlus in Chantilly, Virginia, today we are teaching you how to scrapbook. Now, I am going to teach you how to choose a scrapbooking album. We have several different kind of albums and several different kind of sizes. We use the small album, and it's usually used as a Brag Book, maybe a grandma will put their grandchildren in it, very easy to carry and stick in a purse and take with you. The next size is usually 6x6 or an 8x8 album. Then we go to a larger, 8x11, or the largest, which is a 12x12. When choosing an album it's important to decide how many pictures you’re going to need. If you have an open-ended project, which is usually somebody’s life, like you have a newborn baby, and you’re going to continue to scrapbook throughout their life. You would want to use the largest album. This is a Strap Hinge album, what I mean by strap hinge, that’s how it's bound. You can add more pages to all of these albums. You would unstrap this and add the pages.

The next kind of album is a Post Bound album, and it has posts in here that you would unscrew and add more pages to thicken your book and to make it larger. The next kind we have is a Three Ring Binder, which you would just open and add more pages and expand your book that way. There are disadvantages and advantages to both. The Strap Hinge if you notice, this is the page, so you would put all of your scrap booking elements on this page, and then you would put a sleeve or protective cover over it. On the back you would do the same. So, this page is really two pages. When you use a Post Bound album, you can decorate a page and you can put two in, so you would have one on this side and one on the other side. The advantage to this is you don’t have to go into any chronological order, if you mess up you can pull a page and put it in a different pocket. Also, I have noticed having three children now grown, dividing the albums is a lot easier when you use a Top Loading album, because then you can divide the pictures and make a total new book from several albums. All of these are archival safe. When you go to a scrapbook store that’s what they will sell you is archival safe. You need to be careful about PVC. PVC is a plastic that emits a gas and that will help deteriorate your pictures even faster. If you remember the old magnetic adhesive albums, that’s what they did, most of the pictures turned orange or brown around the edges.

So, you need to get those out of those albums and store them in an archivally safe place. If you have trouble getting those pictures out of that album, what you can do is take a piece of wax dental floss, put it under the corner of one of your photographs, and easily wedge it in between the album page and the photograph, and it should come off easily. Next were going to teach you how to choose your tools for scrap booking.