How to Make a Beautiful 'Memories' Collage for Holidays, Mother's/Father's Days, etc.

 During the holidays, I often find myself out of money to buy everyone gifts, so I usually wind up making my own. This year, I decided to make a homemade gift more meaningful by making my parents a huge 'memories' collage from my old pictures, clothes, craft supplies and memorabilia from my (early) childhood. This  idea will probably work better for you if you are a hoarder, like me, and keep every single thing you can, no matter how useless it is. After all, now you can finally say, "See? It turns out it WAS useful, just like I always said it would be!", AND you get a totally awesome, quick and easy homemade gift. 

Step 1 Supplies and Ideas

 The main supplies you need for this are:

1.   A piece of cardboard, thick posterboard, wood, etc. for the actual collage (Make it bigger than           you think it'll need to be; once you start getting out the supplies, you won't be able to stop!)
2.   A container of dry-clear, secure glue (I used Elmer's)
3.   Scissors
4.   Tape
5.   Ribbon, fake little flowers, nice stickers, etc. (optional)
6.   Craft paper/some kind of background paper (preferably varied, but you hopefully won't see it             much anyway)
7.   Decopauge glue (optional)
8.   Imagination!!!
9.   Assorted memorabilia.

      For that last one, you can get pretty much anything you can think of that has some meaning to you or your collage recipient, as long as you're sure it'll look good (and stay on) the collage. I used scraps of old clothes, childhood artwork, pictures, postcards, childhood poems, and cute things I used to say typed in cool fonts and cut out. These are only a few of the things you can use, and it all depends on what you think the collage recipient will appreciate the most. I made mine with as much slightly 3D stuff as possible, to catch the eye as it goes across the paper. Be creative!