Photo collages

If you are like me (a keen scrapbooker but not the best photographer in the world!), you will probably find that a lot of the photos you take are less than perfect. The ratio of mediocre shots to standout photographs tends to increase on nights out when I'm perhaps not entirely in control of all the settings on my camera! However, its a shame not to scrap an event, just because all the photos are pretty poor.

This is where photo collages come in. Of course, its simple enough to print a lot of photographs out in different sizes and move them around on the page yourself. But it doesn't give you a lot of room for trial and error. So using a photo software package like Picasa is ideal. The software is free to download, and allows you to view all of your photographs and upload them easily to web albums. But it also allows you to create different types of photo collages which are easy to manipulate and change around until you are happy with the result. You can set the overall page size too, so you don't end up printing anything too big to fit on a scrapbook page.

The positives of this type of software is that you can easily change the arrangement and size of the photos, as well as their relative angles, without printing them out first. Here is my first attempt at a collage:

And here is how I used it on a page. I actually printed off two of the same collage so that I could layer up some of the photos on foam pads for added dimension. The photos were taken on Valentines night this year - we went out with friends, and ending up messing about with the camera in the pub. The photos were naff, but put together in a collage, they get across the fun feel of the evening.

The Cosmo Cricket Girl Friday papers are gorgeous - the colours are vibrant and fun, perfect for celebration or girlie layouts. One of the papers also has lots of different words and phrases which would be perfect for embellishing. On this layout though, I made use of the cutout strip at the bottom of the paper, which is also very pretty, to create some custom embellishments - a very thrifty technique in these credit crunch days!