How to Come Up With Scrapbook Page Titles From Quotes, Famous Lines, Lyrics and More

Making the connections

Discovering a movie title, a line from a song, a well-known phrase, or a lesser-known and eloquent line of poetry that connects your photos to their story is always satisfying. The following are ideas (and even a technique) for coming up with scrapbook titles that give your layouts extra punch.

Sometimes connections to well-know phrases are easy, as in “Soda-Pop Anniversary.” I made a page  about my husband’s gift to me on our anniversary: a 12-pack of Diet Coke. Of course, the gift of a 12-pack of Diet Coke isn’t all that elegant and doesn’t sound all that special until I journaled about him biking to get it and carrying it home on his back. I wanted a  fun title,  so I played off the traditionally-recommended anniversary gifts (1st is paper, 2nd is cotton, 50th is crystal). This one just happened to be the “Soda-Pop Anniversary” in our house.

“Women Who Love Wool Too Much” is another fun scrapbook page title that was an easy connection to make. It features photos of my friends–women–knitting and yakking. We call our knitting group “Wild N Woolly.” Remembering the book “Women Who Love Too Much” gave me a twist that works for this page: “Women Who Love Wool Too Much.”

When the connections are not so easy or obvious, here’s a process for finding your title.

1) Start with a one-word title placeholder.
For a layout about a vacation outing to a flight museum, I started with three words: flight and fly and air.

2) Look up synonyms for your words. Thank about what connections these new words trigger. Look up synonyms of the synonyms you’ve found.
For the verb “fly,” I found float, skim, ascend. I liked “ascend” and looked at synonyms for that and found “rise” and “soar.”

3) Look for phrases, quotes, taglines, titles and more that include your key words.
(check out the list of references with links below for help in this step.)

4) Examine the quotes and lines you’ve flagged in order to find the piece that works.
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
I knew it was perfect for my subject–which, at its heart, was not as much about the flight museum as about my sons’ love of planes and flight.
The resulting title was a phrase I plucked from the quote: “Impulse to Soar.”

Online resources for generating  scrapbook page title ideas.

• QuoteLand.com offers many topics and subtopics for searching and browsing as well as reference links.
• LyricsMode lets you search for a word within a song title.
• IMDb’s tagline is “earth’s biggest movie database,” so put in a search term at the top and use the pull-down menu next to it to search titles, quotes, characters and more.
• AMC’s Filmsite has a reference of great film and movie quotes of all time.
• Dictionary.com includes a thesaurus, word translator, and encyclopedia reference
• Bartleby.com allows you to search a remarkable collection of dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauri, quotations, and the full text of major works of fiction, non-fiction, and verse.