It may seem like nowadays people only keep their ‘lives’ on their smartphones and everything is digital, but scrapbooking is still a thing for Americans and my girlfriend is a big fan of it.
The digital camera has encouraged us to take hundreds of photographs, but unfortunately most of them remain piled up in a folder on our computer or smartphone.
Scrapbooking is a creative art that involves taking albums with blank but colorful pages or sheets of paper and add photos, memorabilia (such as tickets, business cards, greeting cards…) newspaper articles and embellishments to make it into a photo-storybook. The main purpose of scrapbooking is to preserve memories for future generations, but not secondary is to express creativity in preserving memories.
It is a creative and educational art and an increasingly popular hobby that allows you to preserve your photographic memories in a completely personal way.

Using photographs, paper, cardstock, ribbons and other embellishments and with the aid of glue and scotch tape you can produce works of art. These pages can be journal style (which is full of written information, a story, a poem, thoughts and emotions) or it can be presentation style with travel tickets, brochures and maps, plus anything else that is related to the photo that we want to present (it wouldn't be so absurd to add locks of hair, dried flowers, receipts and even price tags! All that helps make a page special and unforgettable for you and your family).
Scrapbooking is a way to show off those photos, tell their story and tell their meaning.

All you need to get started are paper, cardstock and various decorations, a cutter or scissors, a cutting mat or cutting pad and some glue or a hot glue gun. If you get passionate about it, you can then add different tools (and there are many!), embellishments and decorations (and the choice is always wider!).
A scrapbooking kit is a good option to start trying your hand at this art, but not just for beginners: the kit offers a selection of different types of paper and embellishments, almost always coordinated with each other, to which you just add glue, tape and a photograph.
In general, when starting a project it is best to decide beforehand what format of paper or album you want to use. The albums and cards and cards are available in different sizes.
Then you need to choose the photos and what you want to associate with it. So start with a theme, for example a trip: photos of your last vacation and everything that reminds you of it.
Other topics to draw inspiration from: birth of a child, wedding, day trip, animals, family, Christmas, New Year's Eve, Easter, birthday, Halloween…the choice is virtually endless.
You can create a simple or more detailed layout, with just one photo, or with multiple photos on each page, as you like.
You can then add an infinite number of embellishments including but not limited to: decorative fabric ribbons, or washi tape, simple stickers or 3D stickers, glitter, vintage labels or tags, paper clips of different shapes and colors, prints made with stamps (wooden, acrylic or rubber) and ink pads or inked pads, decorations made with hole punchers, buttons of all colors and patterns and so much more.
There are also many techniques (for example embossing) and different products.
Over time you can develop your own style and perfect it.

Finally, there are extremely interesting scrapbooking techniques, namely cardmaking, which allows you to create handmade cards and tickets, using materials such as colors of all kinds (especially colored pencils and water and alcohol-based colors), dies, paper and stamps, and mixed media art, which consists instead in the creation of three-dimensional scrap works, thanks to the use of embellishments, inserts and relief decorations such as stencils and specific pastes for this particular type of technique.