Being in the military is a lifestyle all its own. You might be a service personnel or the parent, spouse or child of someone in the armed forces. The military life touches everyone who loves someone serving in any one of the service branches whether it is the Marines, Navy, Army, Air Force, or National Guard. Military scrapbooking ideas all start with how the military life affects you.

Scrapbooking Ideas for Military Personnel

As a member of the armed forces, you will want to preserve and document your military experience. Recording your memories of your service years is important not only for yourself, but also for your children and future generations. Your years in the service are not only personal, but they document our national history as well. You might have served in a war or responded to a national crisis. Preserving your memories of those experiences will tell others your first-person account of a moment in history.

Items to Include In Your Military Scrapbook

• Your service documents including your enlistment application
• Newspaper articles
• Photos of you receiving recognition
• Photos of returning home from a duty station
• Photos of your military friends
• Photos of your service stations
• A time line of your years in service, including where and when you served
• Pages or quotes from your personal journal, including your hopes, fears, and thoughts
• Information on the training you received, including when and where you received training
• Photos of boot camp, including your graduation
• Awards and recognition with journaling on how, when and why you received them
• Photos of your metals and ribbons including how, when and why you received these honors
• Highlights of your military career
• Photos of ceremonies you participated in
• Your retirement party

Scrapbooking for Family Members of Military Personnel

Is someone you love in the armed forces? You may want to document their military career for them, or create a scrapbook about how that person's military life affected you. Being the spouse, child or parent of someone in the military, you will have your own thoughts, fears, feelings and hopes about his/her military life. Your scrapbook can be a gift for the military personnel or for someone else in their family, like a son or daughter. It also can be an account of how military life affected your own life experiences.

Items for Family Members to Include in a Military Scrapbook

• Photos of you with your loved one in the service
• Farewell photos
• Homecoming photos
• Journaling of your feelings about being part of a military family
• Moving day photos from one service station community to another
• Letters or emails written from your loved one in the armed forces
• Photos of military family events like picnics or formal parties
• Newspaper articles

Scrapbooking companies are responding to the huge demand for military scrapbooking supplies. You can find albums with armed forces emblems on the cover. Stickers and embellishments relating to the military service are also available. However, it's your own personal photos and journaling that will create a military scrapbook that will become a legacy to future generations.

Christine Perry is an avid scrapbooker and has over 10 years of scrapbooking experience. Her favorite scrapbooking subjects are her reluctant teenagers. She invites you to her website, http://www.intoscrapbooking.com for more scrapbooking ideas and scrapbooking ideas with kids.

Many of us have friends and family serving our country, and what better way to preserve their memories than some special military scrapbook pages.

For this layout I used a 5x7 photo of my daughter, double matted the photo in coordinating blue and cranberry cardstock.  Created a red ribbon border  using three large white brads and a 3-D K and Company chipboard Christmas accent.  The photo is off-centered to the lower right corner of the designer paper and accented with coordinating red, blue and white felt snowflakes, which add texture to my layout.

Product Name: K and Company Chipboard Christmas Accent, Felt Snowflakes, Christmas Ribbon

Available at :  K and Company Chipboard Christmas Accent, Twopeasinabucket.com, Scrapbook.com.

Now its your turn  share your thoughts , photos, and  designs , I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend see you soon!

Sports themes are a great idea for scrapbooks and soccer is no exception. If you play soccer or have a child who plays soccer, then this is a great opportunity to do something special to keep those memories preserved for a long time to come. A sports-themed layout is a great way to take your soccer photos and turn them into something special.

No matter what layout or theme you choose for your scrapbook, it will be extra special when you make it yourself. This can be great fun to do and especially fun to do together with your child. A child of any age who plays soccer can enjoy making a scrapbook with you to preserve their memories.

Your soccer theme might revolve around the player themselves with some snapshots of the team and other players thrown in. If you have a player who has been playing for a number of years, your theme could show them over several seasons of soccer play.

Another option for your soccer scrapbook theme is to represent the whole team and decorate the scrapbook in team colors and logo. You might go for a general soccer theme where you include all of your favorite photos and a real smorgasbord of soccer designs and themes.

You might choose to give each page a title and them work the theme on an individual page basis around this title. For example, it might show player MVP, rising star, championship game or other special events. You can frame photos with soccer themed words such as MVP, goal, get in the game and more.

Depending on the size of your scrapbook, each page might have 2-5 photos or more on it. You can use posed shots and candid shots as well as sports cards and other memorabilia. You might include the child’s favorite professional player in the scrapbook as well.

You can get members of the team to sign the scrapbook or write special notes to be placed inside the book. Whenever your child looks back on this later in life, they will remember each friend and teammate they had as well as fun activities that took place during the season and their favorite games.

You can use colors, stickers, words and phrases and sayings to add to and accentuate your memories but remember that they should not overshadow or upstage your actual photos, which are the meat of the memories you will find in your scrapbook.