Gear by Lisa Brown, as seen in Budget-Friendly Scrapbooking, page 38.

When you're creating scrapbook layouts using just cardstock, photographs, and a pen, your personal handwriting becomes an important scrapbook page element—and you want it to look great. Here are ten tips to help you make your handwriting look fantastic:

1. Start with a good quality pen that writes in a fine line and doesn't skip.

2. Write slowly and deliberately.

3. Use a light box, and place a grid under your backlit cardstock. Using the gridlines, you can precisely place your journaling without drawing lines on your page.

4. Use a ruler as a journaling guide, but keep moving it down as you write each line of journaling. Doing this will keep your journaling straight, but you won't have to erase any ruler lines.

5. Stagger the beginning of each journaling line, so both the right and left sides of the text have a "ragged" edge, which enables the journaling to more uniformly fill the space.

6. Use the edges of your photographs as journaling lines.

7. Trace your journaling twice when writing on dark backgrounds with opaque markers.

8. Plan where you want to journal before you create your layout.

9. Use software to create a font in your own handwriting.

10. Experiment with journaling directly on a photograph using a pen meant for writing on slick surfaces, such as an American Crafts Slick Writer.

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For more easy tips and techniques for stretching your scrapbooking stash, check out

Nine Tips for Scrapbooking Using Cardstock

Five Tips for Cutting Paper Accents for Scrapbook Pages

Five Tips for Using Rub-ons on Scrapbook Pages

Want more wallet-savvy scrapbooking ideas? Pick up a copy of Budget-Friendly Scrapbooking from Creating Keepsakes.

Appeared in:

Budget-Friendly Scrapbooking

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