Friendship book – design your own scrapbook for best friends

I love photos, which is why I always take so many. They are usually used in photo books, and I enjoy flipping through them again and again. For a milestone birthday of a friend who loves photos just as much as I do, I came up with the idea for a friendship book. The pre-made books personally didn't leave enough space for our shared photos (we really have a lot of photos!), so I had the idea to simply craft an individual friendship book using a photo album. I can say in advance that this was very well received, and I also want to say: start in time. To save you the tedious research for such a personal friendship book, I have summarized some ideas for such a unique piece here:

The very personal friendship book – design your own scrapbook

What you’ll need:

• Photo album or scrapbook
• Photos (funny frames are possible with many photo development services!)
• Photo corners, photo glue, etc. (a lot in my case!)
• Pens, Metallic pens
• Glue
• Scissors
• colorful paper
• funny craft scissors
• paper flowers (use flat flowers!)
• Stickers with funny sayings,
• glitter stones
• colorful adhesive tape or with Lace
• Zen Pen pens
• Feathers

Instructions:

First of all, choose a nice photo album. Here you should consider right away: do I have a lot of photos or rather fewer? How big are my photos? My photo album should have a corresponding number of pages or large pages. If it is a gift, you can also stick to the recipient's favorite color or favorite motif.

The selection of photo books is large; you can use a normal photo album here (with transparent dividers):

Advantage: here you have a lot of space; many photos can be glued in total and per page, even in larger formats.

Disadvantage: if you haven't done a page well, it can only be torn out, and no additional pages can be inserted.

Very nice are also scrapbooks. These are usually very handy, with beautiful covers and rings inside, as well as insert sheets.

Advantage: Here the pages can be sorted individually, or removed or inserted. When choosing, pay attention to the thickness of the book; if the book is thick enough, several pages can be inserted.

Disadvantage: they are usually smaller pages (not quite A4!), smaller or fewer photos fit in, and if you choose the black insert sheets, special metallic markers are recommended to label and decorate the pages.

I have already made friendship books with a normal photo album and a scrapbook and find both very good. As I said, it depends very much on what the focus is. I chose the photo album because I wanted to accommodate a lot of photos. With the scrapbook, I had fewer photos and also smaller ones, so it wouldn't have been enough for a large photo album.

The time-consuming part of such a personal friendship book is choosing and sorting the photos. Here I recommend starting very early, because depending on the desired time period (for me it was photos from several years!), it can take longer to select suitable photos. Here I also needed photos per heading (e.g., funny photos of us, vacation photos, or photos of our great cakes, etc.). I looked up some headings on the internet and used some of them.

You can view the whole list of my collected texts here as inspiration:

Texts for a personal friendship book

Whoever wants to can write the headings by hand into the album (there are also templates for fonts!), or, like me, print them out with a printer. To do this, list the selected headings in Word in the desired font and color one below the other. Always leave some space between the individual texts so that you can cut them out nicely. Print out the texts – I printed them on colored paper – and cut them out with, for example, craft scissors.

Once the photo album and photos are available, it's time to sort. Depending on how many photos you have had developed (and in my case, that was really a lot!), this can become a bit confusing. (Here I speak from experience again!). Either you have a great friend like I do who is organized and decisive and takes charge, or you follow the following Extra tip and simply try to assign the photo according to your first instinct without thinking too much:

Extra tip: Print out or cut out the texts or headings for the photo book. Lay them out on a large table or on the floor and place the matching photos underneath. If you cannot/do not want to glue them in right away, simply put the heading with the matching photos into suitable envelopes and store them sorted. This means also paying attention to the order: with which heading do I start my book, structure everything a bit thematically, and think about a conclusion. Now one envelope after another can be incorporated into the photo book. That was an incredible relief, and you could finish the book in stages and didn't always have to think about what comes next?! By the way: you can also cut photos smaller or funnily; it sometimes saves a lot of space and looks great (e.g., cut out round, or make the pages narrower so that you can glue more photos to them).

Once all texts and photos are glued in, it's time for the – for me – most beautiful part: decorating! According to taste, mood, and fancy, the pages can now be decorated. I decorated the pages with colorful adhesive tapes, stickers, rhinestones, feathers, or lace tapes. Decorations with these Zen Pen pens are also very nice – just be careful: they really have to dry well, otherwise they will stick to the next page! For headings that do not have matching photos, the matching texts are written by hand or printed paper pages are added or glued in. You can also print out beautiful illustrations or texts from the internet and incorporate them into the book. After a few evenings, a truly (yes, I am proud of it!) beautiful, very personal book was created. In my case, the recipient was really, really happy – I can highly recommend it! And the somewhat smaller and thinner scrapbook was also very, very well received.

Conclusion: In the end, it was a lot of fun for me. Picking out the photos and especially decorating the pages was great. I had a little trouble structuring and selecting the photos (which heading does the photo fit into?!). And as I said: start in time. Depending on the size, it is very extensive and can cost a few evenings. I personally think such an album is really, really great.

Extra tip: If you don't want to do quite so much work, you can also buy ready-made friendship books. Here all the details are provided, but you also read again and again in many reviews that you should start in time, as it is very often very time-consuming.

Photos by Sabine, meinhaushalt.at

Read also: Make personalized photo gifts yourself