I don’t know about you but whenever I find myself in a craft store I become entranced with the scrapbooking section. All those beautiful papers, cute little buttons and ribbons, adornments, embellishments, oh my! The Man has to drag me out of there each and every time or else I’ll throw down our MasterCard in glee and charge up a fortune worth of textured papers and gold foil alphabet sets. Scrapbooking is a hobby that can get expensive if you’re not careful, y’all.

That’s when I discovered digital scrapbooking. All of those pretty papers at a mere fraction of the price in digital format! Yee haw! But still, a few dollars here and a few dollars there can really start to add up. Add that to the price of a photo editing program like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and you’re in for an investment, especially these days when milk and gas are both $4 a gallon.

So I’m here to tell you how you can start your very own digital scrapbook with no money at all. Assuming that you have a working computer of your own, you can be digiscrapping today without spending a dime.

First I’m going to assume you don’t have a photo editing program to use. Now, you can spend a lot of money on great programs and they work great! However, maybe you’re just not sure if you’re going to be that into this hobby and you don’t want to lay out the investment for one of these programs.

GIMP is a great program that is absolutely free and works just great for digital scrapbooking! Like any new program it can take some getting used to, but with a little practice and patience, you’ll be using it like a pro in no time. Just like the big image programs, GIMP allows you to use Layers and retouch photos so you can make those fabulous pages you’ve seen all the scrapbookers displaying all over the web. There are great tutorials to help you get started on GIMP’s site and elsewhere throughout the web. A simple Google search of “GIMP tutorials” will bring you over half a million results!

Now that you’ve got GIMP installed, you’re ready to get started! You’ll want to play around with some of your own photos and digital kits to start making your first page. It’s easy to just go ahead and buy a kit or two to play around with, but you can find some great freebies to get yourself started!

A few great resources for free scrapbooking kits that I’ve found are DigiFree, Shabby Princess, and Two Peas in a Bucket. There are so many more, too! I made the following page dedicated to my daughter and her cousin by using a free kit found at Scraps by Pousine. I used the free program GIMP to create it and it didn’t cost me a nickel!

Scrapbooks Gone Digital provides some great tutorials specifically on GIMP here, and another great resource for advice on how to get started with digiscrapping can be found at the Justmommies forums! There’s just a ton of helpful advice for a new scrapper to be found there.

Once you’ve decided you’re hooked on digital scrapbooking (it won’t be long, trust me!), you may want to invest the money in another program and it’s always nice to support the sites that offer these freebies by going ahead and purchasing some of their kits. For now, though, there’s just no reason not to try out this absolutely wonderful hobby. You’ll be expressing yourself, preserving some of your favorite memories, and creating art all at the same time! So what are you waiting for?  Get scrapping!