Scrapbooking for Boys - Four Tips

There comes a time when your son has outgrown robots, frogs, and dump trucks. You can't decorate the scrapbook pages for him with pastel blues, greens, and yellows. But the well can get a little dry when you move from scrapbooking his first tooth to scrapbooking his first date. You could keep using the pastels, but don't be surprised if your son tells you the pages you create about his dirt bike race using clouds and cupids is "lame."

So my recommendation is to put the baby stuff away and focus on who he is now. Let his current personality drive the product choices you use. Here's how:

One easy way is to focus on the activities he's involved in. We're a big sports family, so I have a bunch of sports scrapbook pages in my albums, from football to wrestling. There are plenty of themed products for almost every sport under the sun. But please not that you don't HAVE to use themed products on every page. Instead, you can just opt to use more neutrals, or colors that match his team.

If you like themed scrapbooking supplies, you can choose hobbies to highlight. I created one page documenting my son's love of playing card games, and I was able to find adorable playing card stickers to use. Whatever your son's interests, there's likely patterned paper or embellishments to match. A trip down the scrapbooking aisle will turn up everything from video games to computers to cars.

And if you're just doing general-topic "personality" pages, then the sky's the limit! You could:

Use colors he likes. Don't worry about if it's a "boy color" or not. If you use the colors he likes, not only will it be a better reflection of his tastes, he'll also like the resulting scrapbook page better!
Have him journal. In the "House of Cards" layout mentioned above, I asked Ben to contribute the journaling, since the page was really about his love of playing cards with his uncle, dad, and grandpa.
Think about stronger lines and colors. You can go bolder on the colors and contrasts, like in the black and yellow, and black and red pages.
Don't be afraid to use some "girly" elements. Combine them with more masculine products, and stronger colors and designs.

So there you have it, a handful of ways to make sure the boys in your life get their due in your scrapbooks!

For more creative scrapbooking ideas and inspiration, visit Lain Ehmann's blog at http://www.layoutaday.com. Through scrapbooking videos, tutorials, projects and inspiration, Lain helps her readers make their scrapbooking fun, fast and fabulous!