One of the tricks that seems to excite new scrapbookers the most is the ability to crop pictures into fun shapes. Here's a section of one of my earliest scrapbook pages:
Yes, I'm cringing right now! At least my circles were cut nicely because I used a circle cutter tool. If you are going to physically turn your photos into circles use a circle cutting tool. I would suggest that you don't do a lot of that though. I wish I hadn't cropped all of these. Sure I fit more photos on a page but I would have a lot more options if I had left them in square or rectangle shapes. There are all sorts of ways to hack up your photos and I hope I can convince you to put away the fancy tools and decorative scissors for the most part. They are fun occasionally, but photos usually look best in their more natural state. If you are going to crop your photos make sure you have a backup copy in physical or digital form.
Now if you are digi scrapping (especially with digital photos) you can get as crazy as you want with shapes. I would still caution you to stay on the simple side of things. I've been wanting to put these photos on a digital layout but I quickly realized that I didn't have a lot of choices since the photos were circular and I didn't have any backups. (BAD Scrapbook Lady!) I decided to look for digital templates that utilized circles in the design. I was thrilled to find this one by Hillary Heidelberg!
The nice thing about digital circles is that they always turn out perfectly shaped!
Template by Heidi Heidelberg Scrapbook Graphics (encircled)
Girls are Yucky by Lili Designs from The Digi Files 8
font is CK footnote
Journaling:
We went out for a spaghetti dinner to celebrate Grandpa’s birthday. Alex just loves to eat pasta! At 18 months he is a silly little guy who loves to have fun. He already knows his alphabet and numbers and looking at books is one of his very favorite activities.
Crop circles can be scary in cornfields. They can also be scary on scrapbook pages if they aren't done right! Take my advice and don't overdo your photo cropping.
