Downloadable and Printable Resources

The internet is a fantastic place to find all sorts of goodies to use on your scrapbook pages. Without leaving home, you can create entire pages using printouts and templates that you’ve downloaded from the Internet. Often free, these resources have numerous benefits.

• They’re available anytime of the day or night, so when you need them, you can get to them.


• They can be printed on whatever medium you desire—cardstock, vellum, canvas or transparencies are just a few of your options.


• Possibly the best feature of printable resources is they can be used over and over again. You’ll never run out!

With a little bit of searching, you can find all sorts of treasures on the Internet. I spent a couple of hours digging and found some fantastic printable resources to share.

First we’ll look at printable embellishments. These printable files are fully embellished and ready to print, cut and paste to your pages. These low cost (or even free) files are best printed on a photo-quality printer. An important factor to remember when using printable files is the end-quality is only as good as the printer that prints them. Take that into consideration when downloading or purchasing these files.

Scrapbook.com offers E-Cuts, E-Alphabets, and E-Completes. E-Cuts are sheets of coordinating embellishments, including journaling boxes, photo corners, title blocks and embellishments. They come in a huge variety of themes, many of which are difficult to find in store-bought products, and have a wonderful three-dimensional look. E-Alphabets are themed alphabets and numbers that can be printed and cut out to use for titles. E-Completes are complete layouts that can be printed on your home printer. Simply add photos to finish the page. Each file is an Adobe PDF file and can be opened and printed from any computer with Adobe Acrobat Reader (free to download).

Other printable embellishments can be found at eScrappers.com. Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe PhotoShop Elements users will have a field day at this web site. These computer-generated embellishments mimic some of the most popular three-dimensional elements used in scrapbooks. Items like paint chips, slide holders, walnut-inked tags, film strips, metal photo corners, and tile alphabet letters are just a few of the items you can print and use. While they’re originally meant for computer generated layouts, each of these can be used as printable items as well. Using your photo editing software, you can alter the colors and size of each embellishment, making them fully customizable to your pages. These files are available primarily in PSD (Adobe PhotoShop files) and PNG format. While they work best when used with Adobe PhotoShop programs, many of the PNG or JPG files can be used with other photo editing software programs as well.

Clip art can also be used in scrapbook pages. Microsoft’s web site has an excellent library of free clip art. These small cartoon-like images make excellent embellishments to a scrapbook page. They can be used to add visual interest to your journaling by including images in place of certain words. For instance a clip art clock could be used for the word “time” within your journaling. Clip art can also be used to create a watermark image behind journaling or a title. A light blue baby footprint makes a wonderful background for journaling about a new baby boy. Borders, embellishment squares, and photo corners are other areas of your page that you might use clip art images.

There are also many patterns and templates that do not require a photo-quality printer. They can be printed on any type of printer paper and used to create your own embellishments such as paper piecings, tags and envelopes.

Paper piecing is a technique that has been used in scrapbooking for years and it’s still a popular technique for adding embellishments to your page. With new patterns emerging almost daily, it’s easy to find new ones to use in your pages. Paper piecing patterns (both free and purchasable) can be found all over the Internet. A search for “scrapbook paper piecing patterns” will return thousands of possible matches. While each pattern will vary, they will usually include the outline of each piece of the pattern, a short list of instructions, and an image of the finished product.

Below are a couple of web sites where you can find numerous paper piecing patterns to download:
- http://scrapbooking.about.com/cs/freepattern
- www.cropycats.com

Various sizes and styles of tag and envelope templates can be downloaded and printed at:
- http://www.red-castle.com/software/software.htm
- http://www.bydonovan.com/templates.html

Simply print these patterns on a piece of regular printer paper and use them as a guide to cut your own embellishments and paper piecing creations from cardstock or patterned paper.

We’ve hit the highlights, but there are all sorts of other items to download and print to use on your pages. With a little bit of imagination and thinking outside of the box, the possibilities are limitless. When you’re looking for that perfect embellishment for a page, before you pack up the kids go shopping, take a minute to think about how you might be able to print it yourself!

Article originally printed in the Ivy Cottage Creations April 2004 issue.

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Related Links:  Creative Printing  Using Your Scanner and Printer as Scrapbooking Tools  Computer Generated Scrapbooking

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