I am a scrapbooker at heart.

And the main reason I, or anyone for that matter, scrapbooks is so that they can preserve the memories; have photos, and journaling in an album, documenting their everyday life. We thus create a record of our family history for our kids and future generations to come; something for them to remember us by in the far far future.

Every family has a history. A story to tell. One day, while thinking on this topic, I realized that my little daughter didn’t really know much about our ancestors. Learning our family history gives each of us a place in the family structure and explains where we came from, how we fit in and how the family has grown and changed over time. So out came the old ring albums with my parents’ photos. You probably have one album just like that too. But with age, the album has disintegrated and all the photos have become fragile and have started to lose their color. That was when this project was born.

Project: Protect our ancestors’ photographs and heritage in an archival safe way.

These days there are many options available to preserve your old photographs. You can use archival safe photo boxes, which look like shoeboxes, but are built with archival safe adhesives, to store your photos and prevent fade. This way, you photos can be organized and protected so that they can be enjoyed for years to come.

Alternately, you could create a scrapbook of all old photographs, and include any and all old scriptures or documents available. Make sure that the adhesives you are using are archival safe and so are any inks. I would suggest that you scan these documents and photographs and make copies of them to use. This can easily been done at any photo/scrapbooking store or online.

To document our family history, I chose to make a family wall art canvas. This project can easily be modified into a scrapbook layout that would go into an album. I wanted the photographs displayed up on the wall, so that my daughter could see them often and we could talk about the people in the photographs.

To begin, I chose a 16 by 20 inch canvas and primed it with white acrylic paint.

While the paint was still wet, I spritzed the canvas with some yellow mist and patted into the canvas. I let it dry for a couple of hours. This will make the canvas looked a bit aged.

Once the canvas dried, I chose few patterned papers and punched out 2.25-inch squares from them using the new 3X lever punches. I then arranged them onto the canvas. I matted them with cream cardstock and inked all the edges with some brown ink. I also ran the inkpad along the edges of the canvas to distress it a bit.

I scanned our entire ancestor’ photographs, and using a photo editing software, added a title to each photo. I then printed my photos and trimmed them to size. You could instead include your handwriting and write who is in the photograph using an archival safe pen.

I added a couple of blocks without photos, as decorative blocks to add some interest to the canvas. For these I used squeeze punches and buttons. I then adhered all my photo squares onto the canvas using glue dots.

I finally added the title “family” and added some cardstock beneath it and ran a strip of burlap to finish the canvas. I cut the V shape from cardstock using the Microtip scissor and then used a regular pencil to give a slight curl to it.