Memories are precious treasures.
If we do not learn to preserve memories, especially the happy ones spent with the ones we love, we would have nothing to look back upon to remind us of joyful times and life lessons learned.
After all, in order to push forward in life, we have to look back and reflect every so often.
It is easy to commit memories to the mind and to the heart.
But the mind and the heart can forget, not when there is nothing to help them remember.
And so, it is necessary to preserve memories by creating our own mementos.
We can easily do that using our printers.
There are many printing projects that we can do to help us preserve memories, and here are three common printing projects you can have fun working on.
1.
Scrapbooks.
Making a scrapbook is probably the most common way of preserving memories.
Most people just stick pictures in a scrapbook and consider the project done.
But you can certainly do better than that.
Print out and collect your digital photos.
Group them together according to date and occasion, and then paste them on the pages of your scrapbook.
Decorate your scrapbook pages with bits of border art and clip art that you can print out from your computer as well.
Also, type out a few lines describing the event and paste them along with your photos in your scrapbook.
If you need ideas, you can find inspiration from a newspaper's or a magazine's society pages.
2.
Mounted frames.
You can also preserve memories effectively by mounting your mementos in a frame.
This is easy to do with photographs.
All you need to do is to print out your digital photos and stick them in a photo frame.
However, if you want to be more creative than that, you can create an attractive collage using photographs you have printed.
You can jazz up this collage by putting in stickers with one-word descriptions of the images in it.
Again, for inspiration, look at the society pages of a magazine.
Photographs are not the only things you can mount on a frame.
Let us say you have a pressed flower that you have kept from your wedding bouquet.
Use this flower as an accent to a wedding photograph that you want framed.
Or you can print out a poem that you love and attach it to a piece of acid-free matting that you can get from an art supply shop.
3.
Picture books.
Who says you cannot write your own picture books? Picture books are fun ways to preserve anecdotes about your life and share them with your family, especially your children and grandchildren.
Collect photographs from an event and write a short story about them.
Arrange them on a scrapbook using simple cutting and pasting.
Or, if you have desktop publishing software, lay them out anyway you want and then print them on glossy or matte paper.
Paste your pages carefully on cardboard and then bind them using a ring binder or a file binder.
It is an easy task to preserve memories.
Even have fun doing it.
Most importantly, you will have something to look back on to remind you of happy days, especially when times get rough.