Sometimes all you need is inspiration to get you going. One of the best ways to find it is to either think up a theme and then look for other peoples work using a similar theme – or simply to look at other peoples work and develop your own theme from there.

There are a ton of layout options available online (especially here: http://www.scrapbook.com/gallery/) – and there are layout sketch books everywhere as well. In fact there are probably millions of layouts and sketches if you count them all up.

But what I like to do (personally) as of late, is search for other peoples great layouts and save the ones I love (to my Pinterest Page: http://pinterest.com/coachcijaye/ or http://pinterest.com/coachcijaye/pins/?filter=likes ) – then I can replicate them later (with my own images, backgrounds and elements etc).

I hope you find something you really like.

One of the easiest ways to create a dedication scrapbook album is to use your daughters first (and perhaps last) name as an acronym and then come up with creative descriptive words that will best describe your daughter, one letter at a time. In other words, each page has a character word on it – that starts with each letter of her name. Another way is to add a new “year in review” page or chapter for each year of her life. Eventually the book will fill itself out – but if you are going to give it to her when she is 18, it will take THAT long to build it. The cool thing is, she can get involved and help you when she gets older so it becomes your special project together. I think she will love it no matter how you do it.

First, let me say how sorry I am to hear about your nephew. I cannot even imagine the pain you must have felt – I am sure he is in peace now and I do hope that you all find that as well.

That said, I think your idea of making a special scrapbook album for your sister would be wonderful. Even if there are a limited set of photo’s for you to share.

If you have very few photos – you could make an “name association” album for him – where each page is a letter from his name (first and last) (starting from the first of course). Then you can find a wonderful word or quote to represent each letter on page. Some pages might warrant the use of more than one photo.

You could also create a CHARACTER album – where each page is a characteristic of your nephews – and the photo’s represent that. This COULD be easier than the “name association” album because you don’t have to come up with words based on letters and settle OR leave more important ones out.

Those would be my choices. I hope this helps hun. I am sure your album will be wonderful.

This is a tough one because all of your articles are probably long text, but there is nothing wrong with creating pocket or fold over pages and storing the complete articles inside / under the visual references you might add. As for visual elements, I would definitely make each TITLE on page – the same as the TITLE of the article. Then I would add photo’s, illustrations, sketches, or memorabilia to match as well. In many creative ways you can direct the viewers to the article(s) too. You can do this with big chunky arrows (saying pull this or open this to view article etc), ribbon ties, paper clips, buttons, hinges or anything similar. I would definitely recommend smash book style for this whole project. Hope this helps.