"A Cat's Life" Scrapbook Layout
by Rachel Paxton

Description: Tips for creating a scrapbook page showing a day in the life of a cat.

If you love your cats as much as our family does, you probably have dozens, even hundreds, of photos of your furry friends. I have been going through and sorting out all my old pet photos, and I will be creating scrapbook pages as tributes to each of the pets we have owned. While my husband and I were looking at the photos, we noticed all the photos of our cats had one common theme: days of eating, sleeping and playing! So I decided to put together a scrapbook layout to celebrate a day in the life of a cat, dedicated to our precious kitties.

Materials needed:

Paper cutter
Glue stick
6 cat photos
(2) 12x12 pieces of solid color scrapbook paper
12x12 piece of coordinating patterned scrapbook paper
Scrapbook layout template
Decorative corner punch
Stickers

This scrapbook layout has three layers: a solid piece of paper as the background, a patterned piece of paper cut slightly smaller and placed on top of the background paper, and then the matted photos on top.

First I cut down the patterned piece of scrapbook paper with my paper cutter. I cut just enough to leave about a half inch of the colored background page showing around the edges. Next I cut the corners of the patterned page with the corner punch for added decoration. I then glued the patterned page on top of one of the colored pages.

To cut out and arrange my photos I used a plastic scrapbook layout template that I purchased at a craft store. It isn't necessary to use a template, but it makes cutting and arranging photos on the page very quick and easy. There is a pattern for both the mat and the photo on the template. After tracing the pattern from the template on both the photos and the second piece of colored cardstock, I cut everything out, glued the photos to the mats, and arranged and glued the matted photos on the patterned piece of scrapbook paper.

I chose to use the phrase "A Day in the Life of a Cat" for the title of the page. For the captions I used "sleep", "eat", and "play". I typed them up on the computer in Microsoft Word and printed them out. For your convenience I have created a .pdf file of the captions I used:

http://www.crafty-moms.com/pdf/a-cats-life.pdf

I glued the title to the top of the page and matted the captions with leftover scraps of the solid colored paper and glued them randomly on the page. If you want you can use stickers to further decorate the page. I used several daisy stickers I had leftover from card making.

Rachel Paxton is a freelance writer and mom of four. For scrapbooking, card making, gift-giving ideas, and more family memory-making activities, visit http://www.crafty-moms.com.