Style: Vintage, Romantic, Shabby Chic, Retro

Vintage/Romantic/Shabby Chic: A close cousin to the Ephemera style, this look combines patterned papers and uses lots of embellishments, but also features lighter colors like pale pink, dusty mauve and light blue. It’s a well-worn, well-loved look, often including torn paper, inked edges and chalked paper. You might also find embellishments that look as though they’re straight from your grandmother’s sewing box: Buttons, thread, metal accents and ribbons or fiber. Think of those wrought-iron beds featured in home decorating magazines and you’ll know what I mean. Use this style for any feminine pages, especially heritage. It’s also a great look for travel pages.

Vintage: Refers to an artistic style. The colors and patterns of your papers, the type of embellishments and the distressing techniques you use all determine a “vintage” style. The colors? Soft shades like rose, ivory and mint green, plus a few bold colors such as burgundy and teal. Embellishments? Think Grandma's sewing box. This means buttons, ribbons, silk flowers, lace and stitching. Distressing? Quick, simple distressing techniques like inking, chalking or sanding the edges of your papers or embellishments or lightly crumpling your papers all lend to a “vintage” style.

Romantic: This includes floral patterns, velvets, lace, and usually soft, warm colors. The text is often created using a script or an ornate, embellished lettering.

Shabby-chic: Comfortable, cozy, and homey. The look is vintage and worn (the look of old cracked china and furniture that's been lightly sandpapered). Anything that looks distressed, aged, scuffed, worn, torn, or otherwise abused can find a home in a shabby chic layout. Shabby-chic scrappers use plenty of tendrils, flowers, and pastels in the form of papers, stickers, die-cuts, and other embellishments. Torn, stitched, and inked papers are commonly found in these albums, and so are pastel, solid, and patterned papers.

Eclectic and fun. Shabby-chic style often features journaling tags, eyelets and laces, chalk techniques, and crumpled papers. Computer-generated fonts that suggest early 20th-century handwriting styles commonly are used for journaling in shabby-chic scrapbook layouts.

Retro: Retro is a hot style right now, in just about everything from stationery and gifts to scrapbooking. While “retro” means different things for people of different ages, it’s really reminiscent of the styles from the 1950's through the 1970's. You’ll find lots of pink and black, pink and brown and blue and brown color combinations, plus cool images and shapes like spirals and big flowers. Whether or not you liked it the first time around, the look is much more contemporary now—and teens and kids love it. Exactly which colors are used depends on the decade you are aiming to evoke.