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Halloween is a great opportunity for scrapbooking. The costumes, the crazy food, and the spooky decorations all make terrific photo opportunities that few dedicated scrappers can resist. But how to best present these once a year photos in your scrapbooks? Here are some ideas for scrapbook layout pages for Halloween.

Use dark cardstock: Halloween photos, usually taken by flashlight, look better on dark cardstock, but if you have a paler cardstock you are desperate to use, you can cut out matte squares and rectangles from dark cardstock on which to mount your photos. Make the mattes just a bit bigger than the photo, so the dark cardstock shows around the edge of the photo, like a frame. Dark blue, black and purple work best as background colors.

Add glitter: There's nothing like glitter to sparkle up your Halloween pages. Use a gluestick to draw something, such as a burst of fireworks, a wavy line, or frames round the photos, and sprinkle on glitter before the glue dries. Shake the excess off the paper, and you have amazing glitter shapes! This looks great if you want fireworks, as you can use different colors in the fireburst by adding more glue and more glitter until you get the effect you want.

Make your own die cuts: Die cuts are easy and fun to do. Make simple shapes, like witch's hats, broomsticks, pumpkins and bats. To make them stand out on your dark background pages, cut your shapes out of glitter felt or paper. You can also get punches that will cut the shapes out for you from your scrapbooking store. Rows of these look great on your pages.

Make spooky bloody titles: Write your titles on cardstock strips using a wet brush and thick red paint. While the lettering is still wet, hold the cardstock vertically, and let the red paint run down into very realistic drips of blood. You can also decorate a whole piece of cardstock this way. "Slash" the cardstock with very wet, thick paint and hold it up so the paint drips.

Spook up your lay outs: Make a `haunted house' by cutting strips in your pages with a sharp craft knife, big enough to slide a photo through. Slide the photos into the strips and fix in place with double sided tape so they `peek out'. This looks very effective on black paper. Decorate the page with faux spider webs from a Halloween store to make the page look even more haunted. Another way to `haunt' a page is to print out your photos on vellum or other very thin transparent paper. This allows the background to show through the images. Great for ghost costumes!

Add surprises: Got some really great spooky photos you want to feature in a startling way? Create a surprise card layout. Fix the photo inside a folded black card, and decorated the outside of the card with a suitable image such as a skull and crossbones, or a warning text like `open at own risk'. Inside another card, stick down a rubber spider or something equally scary with double sided tape and close the card, adding your image or text to the outside. Fix the cards on the scrapbook page so they have to be opened to see the photo - or the surprise!

Learn more about this author, Gail Kavanagh.
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