I’ve been an avid scrapbooker since 2002. In the past decade, I’ve purchased lots of scrapbook albums. My absolute favorites are the American Crafts 3 ring binder style cloth albums.
American Crafts makes several different variations of the three ring binder album. There are plain cloth albums in various colors, as well as ones with the cute floral details like what you see in the picture accompanying this post.
I buy one album for each year, taking care to use a different color. I use the cutout window to make a label showing the year each album covers. When the finished albums are lined up on my bookshelf, they make a cute rainbow of family memories.
I prefer the three ring binder style albums because it’s easy to rearrange pages to make your book “flow” better. I scrapbook chronologically, but sometimes I forget I was going to include a specific set of photos in my book. With the three ring binder album style, I can just slip the extra layouts into the appropriate spot. This style also makes it easy to replace a page if the page protector gets ripped or dirty for some reason.
The cloth albums are more affordable than scrapbooks with leather covers, but still very durable. I have American Crafts albums that are six or seven years old and they still look as good as they did on the day I bought them. My son likes to look through the books too, so they do withstand regular viewing quite well.
Each American Crafts album comes with 10 plastic page protectors, but refill packages are widely available online and in chain craft stores like Hobby Lobby.
Are you a scrapbooker? If so, what is your favorite type of album to use?
Photo credit: Scrapbook.com
