Heidi Swapp Storyline albums are available in multiple designs; there’s one with roses and florals on the cover, one with a rainbow on the cover, a black and white striped design and others. I’ve purchased 4 of these albums and have been happy with all of them. Here’s my Heidi Swapp Storyline album review, along with some project ideas you can check out if you need inspiration for how to use your own Storyline albums.
The TLDR summary of my review: I highly recommend Heidi Swapp Storyline Albums to other crafters (WITH CAVEATS)!
Heidi Swapp’s Storyline collection has been a long-running collection including bunches of different products. I’m reviewing the D-ring binder-style Storyline albums that hold 8.5″ x 11″ pages. Technically, I think these are from the Storyline 2 collection.
If you enjoy scrapbooking in this size, it’s worth taking a look at these albums, because they are a pretty good value for the money you spend on them. These albums come bundled with many, but not all, of the craft supplies you’ll need for making a scrapbook album. For the money you spend, you get the album itself, plus page protectors, plus pages to put in the page protectors, plus a storage envelope. All you need to complete your album is photos and adhesive, plus whatever other embellishments you might want to use on your pages.
If you’re a minimalist, the inserts make it possible to create your scrapbook without buying additional cardstock or patterned paper.
The pages are plain white with discreet spaces to write information about your photos. I LOVE both the page protectors and the pages that come with these albums. They are high quality, durable and useful.
However, if you want to embellish your pages the way you see other scrapbookers doing on social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest, you’ll want to pick up some extra papers and / or embellishments to use in addition to what you get with the Storyline albums. You’ll also need to get adhesive to use for sticking your photos to the inserts.
Cons: Downsides to the Heidi Swapp Storyline Albums
Heidi Swapp’s Storyline Albums do not have many downsides. Overall, the quality is outstanding, and I have been pleased with these albums.
BUT!
I would be a bad reviewer if I didn’t point out the biggest problem that I see with them. Namely, that the albums don’t actually come with enough page protectors and inserts to actually fill them up.
Each album comes with 14 page protectors with inserts. This means you can make a 28-page scrapbook using the inserts and page protectors you get bundled with your D-ring binder. If you have around 28 photos to scrapbook, you should be able to put one per page, and they’ll all fit fine.
It’s also possible to scrap about twice that number if you put 2 photos per page.
You could easily fit many more photos than that in your album if you print them out smaller than the standard 4″x6″ size, or if you don’t do a lot of writing or embellishing on your pages.
If you have more than 50 or 60 photos, you could still probably fit many more of them into this binder, but you’ll ideally want to get more page protectors and inserts to do it so that your photos aren’t too crowded, and so that you can leave room for adding photo captions, page embellishments, etc.
This shouldn’t really be a problem, because the manufacturer also makes refills available, and you can buy those to fill up your album, if that’s what you want to do.
The only problem with that: It is now getting hard to find the refills. I do know of one place to buy them, but this retailer is offering them for sale at a price that’s far more expensive than they were when I bought mine.
But perhaps you have a different opinion on that. If you’ve already made bunches of pages with these albums and inserts, maybe it would be worth it to you to be able to pick up the matching inserts to finish your albums with. In that case, it could be worth paying the higher price to get exactly what you need.
The Storyline albums hold standard-sized 8.5″x11″ pages, so it is also possible to buy other brands of page protectors, and they will fit your Storyline albums just fine. Lately, this is what I have been doing to fill mine.
However, this could get to be problematic for you if you insist on having all the pages in your albums be matchy-matchy — because I don’t know of any place to get the same style of page inserts other than buying these albums or the refill pages from the Storyline collection.
Personally, I don’t want all my album pages to match and look the same. But your mileage may vary.
If you’re like me, and you don’t mind having different brands of page protectors and inserts in your albums, I think you’ll be happy with these albums overall.
If you want to make all your scrapbooking layouts on matching paper, I don’t recommend these albums to you. In that case, I suggest finding something else to use, because you might get frustrated with trying to find the exact same brand of refills for these albums. As of right now, they are still available, but they are expensive as compared against other competing brands of page protectors. I wouldn’t personally pay the going price for them because there are a lot of other similar page protectors available for less money. I don’t care that much about having more of the matching inserts, personally.
Where to Buy a Heidi Swapp Storyline Album
Where to Buy Refill Pages for Your Heidi Swapp Storyline Album
Pictured above is a refill pack featuring page protectors and pages designed for the Heidi Swapp Storyline albums. I have 4 of these albums; the albums come with some page protectors and also the pages to put inside them. Refill packs are sold separately, and the refill packs come with the page protectors and the pages to put in them.
Although these page protectors are intended for use with the Storyline albums, I’ve found that they fit most other 8.5″x11″ scrapbooking binders and albums, too. So if you have a random album that is in need of 8.5″x11″ page protectors, these are likely to work well.
Project Ideas for Using Your Heidi Swapp Storyline Album
You can use this album for making a scrapbook, which is its intended purpose. Or you can use it in bunches of other ways. Check out the following ideas:
- You could use it for art journaling or junk journaling.
- You could use it for displaying coloring pages, illustrations, paintings or drawings up to 8.5″ x 11″ in size.
- You could use it as stamp and die storage; it’ll hold stamp and die sets up to 8.5″ x 11″.
That’s it for my product review of the Heidi Swapp Storyline album. I hope you found this review interesting and informative.
Want to learn about a few other types of scrapbooking albums before you make up your mind whether to buy a Storyline album? In that case, I invite you to check out a few more of my album reviews, as follows:
- Sn@p! Binders – 6″x8″ Scrapbooking Albums by Simple Stories
- Echo Park Christmas Albums
Posted By: Amy Solovay
This page was last updated on 9-11-2024.