Scrap-booking (is there such a verb?) seems so forced, and well, last-century.

Next time you have a lot of pictures to work with, why not make a little booklet? This makes a nice souvenir of a special day or trip, and is a wonderful, small gift.

Here’s how:

1. In your favorite page layout program, divide the page into quarters. Because you will be placing eight photographs, you need to make a second page (the backside of the printed page), also divided into quarters. I used Adobe In-Design, but you could use Photoshop, or even Photoshop Elements.



2. Layout the pictures following the guidelines shown above. The numbers indicate the browse sequence, and the orientation indicates if you should place the picture right-side up or up-side down (standing on its head). Note that the top row of both pages, the pictures are upside down.



3. Print out the first page of your booklet, and put the page back into your printer to print on the backside. Print the second page on the back of the first page. If your printer is capable of doing duplex printing, set it up for that. The picture above shows the pictures for front and back laid out as described in steps 1 & 2 (just smooshed together so you can see both sides of the paper at once). Note that the Eiffel Tower is the cover of my booklet (page 1 in the diagram, above), and so it is where I put a title, Paris.



4. Fold your double-sided page in both directions, as shown. Trim off the top edge, and use a nice bit of decorative thread to bind the pages. Or, alternately, you could follow Cat Morley’s instructions for bookbinding.

You can continue to add pages, but you must add them in sequences of eight. So, if you were to add another sheet of paper, in effect you would increase the page count from eight to sixteen.

All the photographs in this tutorial are courtesy of the talented photographer Jack_G, and are available through a Creative Commons license. You can see more of Jack’s work on his spot on Flickr. For more information on Creative Commons, you can see my previous ReadyMade post.