In my years of scrapbooking, I've done around 30 + albums for all kinds of events. Most have been family events or vacations but some have been gifts for others and even a few that people have paid me to do. One thing that can be done to help keep memorbilia is to make pockets. Here are some pages from various albums of mine through the years with ideas on how to do pockets. Some pockets can be small for just a few things; others can be the entire page.
Let's start with a very simple pocket.
This is a very simple page from my "All About Me" album. This is about my favorite books. Here all I did was use a library pocket that I had. While you can find library pockets in teacher stores & office supply stores, you can also make your own with a die or find a template on the internet to use.
This is another easy pocket from a page in my heritage album. I simply folded over a piece of vellum paper in 3 parts. I attached it in 4 places with eyelets and wrote on the outside flap what I put in it. Here, I've placed driver's licenses, insurance cards, etc that had belonged to my parents while they were alive.
This pocket is simply a piece of cardstock with a ribbon ran through it. I placed adhesive on 3 sides and put one picture and two tags with journaling on them inside it. Because I knew I was not putting anything thick in the pocket, I knew that would work.
I made this pocket with colored cardstock. I measured and cut the cardstock to the size that I wanted it and then used my corner rounder on all 4 corners. I cut a piece of white paper about 1/2" wide and just a little longer than my colored cardstock. I rounded one end and drew straight lines across the paper to make it look like pages. I used a small piece of cardstock the same color as the front for a back "cover."
Drawing a line down the long edge gave it the look of a book spine. I wrote my made up title across the "front" of the book. I had several papers & certificates that I wanted to put in this pocket so I used foam tape under the ends and bottom to give the pocket the depth that I needed. The things in this pocket are VBS certificates, report cards, etc that my mother had kept for many years.
This page came from my heritage album. My mother kept just about everything! Yea! After both of my parents passed, I was able to go through boxes that she had and find many treasures. This page is part of a military layout I did of my dad's service in World War II. The pocket contains his "orders" for duty in the war. I made the pocket as a triangle to sit on the right bottom corner of the page. I used red cardstock for the triangle and white cardstock cut in strips to give it a flag look. The stars are from the punches that I did with the page border. Again, I used foam tape to lift the pocket and give it room for the papers.
Neither page of this 2 page spread had photos on it. I had forgotten to take my camera when we went to the museum in Houston but I still wanted to document the trip. The pocket was made using a heavy patterned paper identical to the background paper. I cut the sheet in half and then cut out a large circle to make it easy to find everything that went in the pocket. The top sheet was lifted using several SU! Dimensionals along the 3 edges.
The pockets on this page were used to help tell the story from different perspectives. I found a picture of each of the people involved in the story and cut the colored cardstock so the pictures would fit on each one. I made tages with my Sizzix machine at the time and put cute brads and ribbon on the top. I asked each person to write out the story from their point of view. I then typed the stories and adhered them to the tags. Some of the stories needed front and back!
I hope that this gives you some ideas of ways to add pockets to your scrapbook pages. Remember that everything you put on your pages doesn't have to be immediately visible to those going through your album. For this page, I slit the page protector with my craft knife so that the tags would slide through them. In the album, I have the ribbon sticking through the slit so that those who want to see can just slide the tag out without having to remove the whole page.
I am sorry that these pictures are so out of focus. When I take things with my camera, these days, the focus is not always the best. With my cards, I can simply place them on my scanner & I don't have to worry about focus or a steady hand. Most of my scrapbook pages are 12 x 12" and I don't have that large of a scanner. Anyway, hope you got some good ideas today.
