How To Make a Brown Paper Lunch Bag Scrap Book

 

I just returned from a week long holiday and I wanted to gather my photos and mementoes all in one place. The best way for me to cherish this snippet of time was to make a paper bag scrap book.

With this type of scrapping, no need to run to the craft store and buy any supplies. Almost everyone has brown paper lunch bags in the house. One of the greatest advantages to these little memory savers is you get a few envelope type openings on the pages into which you can insert menus, tickets, notes and other little souvenirs of your holiday.

Gather the pictures you want to have in your book. Count them. The sum of the photos is how many pages you want in your book. Each paper bag - folded in half - will give you 4 pages. Therefore, if you want to include 12 photos in your book, you'll need 12 divided by 4 = 3. If you want a blank front and back cover for your book, you'll have to add one more bag. Of course you can embellish these covers any way you like.

Here's how it's done.

Supplies: brown paper lunch bags, glue, scrap embellishments, scrapbook paper, ribbon

Fold each bag in half separately

With a hole punch - punch a hole on center fold from top and bottom

Lay bags in opposite directions so you won't have too much bulk - line up the holes

I bound the book by threading raggedy ribbon through the 4 pages of punched holes

Here you can see I've used scrap embellishments and the pocket opening for notes

Book view of open ended pages where mementoes can be tucked



Front cover with title and scrap suitcase embellishment

I used a square of scrapbook paper glued on, to cover the inside of each page before placing a photo on the page. Sometimes I had room to journal right on the page. Sometimes I used a tiny ribboned tag to journal. I slipped those into the open ended pages. I also slipped in a menu from the restaurant where we had birthday dinner and a tiny note that my littlest granddaughter wrote to me.

 

This type of scrapbook makes a perfect remembrance of an occasion. Some occasions you might want to memorialize in this way would be a baby or wedding shower (making a gift of the book for the guest of honor), a birthday party, a holiday (like I did). This is not the type of scrapping where you record years and years of a persons life - but just short little snippets of memories you don't want to forget. I've even done these for a "girls day out" where we've gone to a museum then lunch and all the scenery in between. Such sweet memories. Savor them ♥