For some people the term “scrapbook” evokes visions of construction paper, shaped photos and stickers.

But, for me, scrapbooking is about so much more:

In scrapbooking events and moments from my life and that of my family, I get a chance to re-live them, to reminisce.

In doing so, I’ve found that I’ve learned to appreciate my life more while I’m living it. It’s made me realize that my life is pretty good, and pushed me to be thankful for my wonderful husband and enjoy the crazy times with my ever-growing and changing children. No, my life isn’t extraordinarily interesting but it’s my life and nobody else is living it quite like me.

Just Another Ordinary Day by Paula Gilarde

Scrapbooking has improved my photography skills

Because of scrapbooking, I’ve learned to appreciate photography, and I am actively working to improve my skills.

Prior to taking up scrapbooking I really didn’t have any interest in photos. In fact, I recently discovered that I possess only two photos from 2001, a year when many very big things happened in my life and in the world in general: I got engaged to my husband, we bought our first house together, we traveled all over Ireland among other places, we went to multiple weddings, I became an aunt for the first time. My nephew is the only reason that there are any photos of me at all from that year, and now, I could kick myself for not making more of an effort to record such a time of change in my life.

Photos are important! Even if you don’t think they are right now, you will later.

2001 by Paula Gilarde

Scrapbooking has ensured I’ll remember the “little things”

The devil is in the details – and so many of those are quickly forgotten.

Photographs are a large element in scrapbooking but the story and the details are just as important. Thinking back to my 40th birthday (which wasn’t that long ago!) I remembered the people who were there, the weather, and the fun. It was when I read the journaling on my scrapbook page, that I recalled that my husband bought TWO cakes for me – one chocolate, one vanilla, one said happy and the other birthday. Tiny little details that make me smile now – I’m glad that I recorded them. And let’s not forget all those cute things the kids do and say, relegated to the past sooner than you’d think.

Celebrate by Paula Gilarde

Scrapbooking has given me a greater appreciation for color and design

Paper crafts have always been a love of mine, and scrapbooking is a way for me to play with lots of paper. Digital scrapbooking has the additional benefit of playing with the same paper over and over!

I love learning new skills and there are so many techniques and tools to learn in every medium that I can satisfy that desire every single day. I’ve learned about graphic design and it’s made me look at the world in a different way – I never flip through a magazine now without noticing the layout/design/colors. The following layout was inspired by a magazine ad for Kleenex!

Ice Cream by Paula Gilarde – ad challenge inspiration

Through scrapbooking, I found friends with shared  interests

I’ve made many good friends through scrabooking.

Online message boards, challenges and design teams have provided me with many friends who share my interests. I’ve been fortunate to meet many of them in real life, also. We chat every day, not just about scrapbooking, but about everything going on in our lives. I feel very lucky to have these women in my life.

O Canada by Paula Gilarde

10 ways scrapbooking could change YOUR life…

I’m such a believer in the positive impact of scrapbooking, I made a layout listing MORE ways in which my life has been improved by scrapbooking:

10 Ways my Life has been Improved by Scrapbooking by Paula Gilarde

1. Leaning Photoshop can make you more employable.
2. Scrapbooking can inevitably lead to improved photography skills.
3. Scrapbooking message boards introduce you to new friends and ideas.
4. Meeting other scrapbookers creates a feeling of acceptance and understanding.
5. Recording memories gives you a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment.
6. Having a handy stash of scrapbooking supplies increases your readiness when it comes to last-minute projects, gifts and crafting with your kids.
7. Scrapbooking helps remind you of the importance of capturing self portraits and personal thoughts.
8. Looking at scrapbooks is a great way for children and adults to pass time, share stories and reminisce.
9. Scrapbooking gives you an excuse to buy pretty things.
10. Now you can remember all of those extra special memories…because you’ve scrapped them!

Make some time to try out a craft that could enrich your life.  As the old slogan goes – “try it, you’ll like it!”

by Debbie Hodge

Photos are easier to come by today than ever before.

You take them with your phone as well as your camera. Your partner, parent, child, friends are taking photos on their phones and cameras and sending them to you via email or facebook or their preferred photo sharing website. You can even find photos you didn’t get a chance to take (i.e., of a place you visited) online from generous Flickr photographers or stock photo sites.

Photos are streaming into your life now from multiple sources. If these photos are not organized and explained, they quickly become a mass that’s not meaningful and that’s even too overwhelming to begin looking through.

How can you catalog and record the memories of this stream of photos efficiently and meaningfully?

Scrapbook them.

Scrapbook? Really?

Some of you are all over the idea of a scrapbook. It appeals to your story-telling, photo-cataloging, crafty selves.

Others of you will have no desire to make a weighty book of photos and memorabilia that will require more time to create and space to store than you’re willing to afford.

Let’s redefine scrapbook

A scrapbook is made up of scrapbook “pages.”

A scrapbook “page” combines some or all of the 5 basic scrapbook page elements.

1. photos
2. journaling
3. title
4. embellishments
5. the canvas upon which these sit.

A scrapbook “page” can be

1. on and of actual paper
2. a digital rendering of the traditional scrapbook page
3. a blog post
4. a slide in a slideshow
5. anything and any size and any medium you want it to be.

Here a scrapbook page is shown as: 1) a blog post, 2) an arrangement of photos, journaling, title, 3) a 12"x12" scrapbook page, 4) a slide in a slideshow.

How to start making your kind of “scrapbook page”

Include some or all of the scrapbook page elements.

1) Photos.

Select one or more photos of a moment or event that you like looking at and thinking about right now.

Sure, you might like to remember everything (at least all of it that’s good) but if you want to keep living a life that’s worth taking a photos of there isn’t the time to record all of it. So pick the photos you want to record right now.

2) Journaling

Write the information that you’ll need in order to recall the who and what—and, most importantly, the details that make the particulars of the photo worth remembering.

Ask yourself: Why do I like looking at this photo right now? It might be a sentence. It might be a longer piece of writing. The key is that YOU are telling the story now so that when someone (including you) comes across this photo in later years they comprehend it in a meaningful way. They see and read the story as you told it. They know why it was important enough to select for special treatment (special treatment=your version of a scrapbook page) by reading this journaling.

3) Title

A title can be a great cue to deeper meaning, a reminder of something fun, or simply a label of place or event or people that you then may or may not have to include in your journaling. You can include one or not.

4) Canvas

Combine photos, journaling, and title onto a “canvas” that works for you. When choosing your canvas, understand that it will need to be stored in a way that you can access tomorrow and in 10 years. For paper canvases, that could mean an album or archival box. For digital canvases, that could mean a folder on your computer’s hard drive, an “album” at a photo storage and sharing site, printed pages or even a printed and bound photobook.

Your canvas could be:

- a physical piece of paper

- a digital canvas

- a blog post

- a slide in a slideshow

- you tell me!

NOTE: YOU can define size if you’re not using traditional paper albums or an online service’s photobooks.

Your canvas background could be a solid background or you could use patterned papers (paper or digital) or a combination of papers and other elements (it’s up to you: ribbon, memorabilia, mats . . .).

The benefit of choosing a background that’s not simply solid white or black, is that it offers you the opportunity to set the tone for your page and perhaps even include a relevant motif.

5) Embellishments

Embellishments are the little decorations that add charm (and that should support your page subject and or tone). Maybe they’re not for you — but there are useful functions embellishments can play on a scrapbook page.

Start scrapbooking because it makes your photos accessible records of your life.

So that’s it. You should start scrapbooking because otherwise your photos will become part of an undefinable mass that doesn’t tell your stories. Photos can be preserved to evoke feelings, trigger associations, and tell those who see them in the future what YOUR story was. If you don’t scrapbook they will be part of a large collection that doesn’t really convey why the individual photo matters.

There will even be times when you don't have a photo but there's an important story or milestone in your family's life that should be preserved--that will matter to those involved tomorrow and in 25 years. Looking through my scrapbook pages from 2010 and reviewing where my family had been that year, I realized I never told the story of my husband's surgery for prostate cancer. Talk about an important story! And, talk about this being the kind of thing you'd like to remember not only in details but in feelings. That's what scrapbooking does for you -- it tells your stories the way you'd tell them -- not the way others looking through photos guess at them.

Think of scrapbooking as:

1. Selecting photos that compel you.
2. Writing about them.
3. Perhaps titling them.
4. Putting them onto some kind of “canvas.”
5. Storing that canvas in a way that you can access in years to come.

Let’s start a pictorial-memoir, photographic-story-telling stampede. If you’re already a scrapbooker, show this to your friends who are not so they’ll see just why you scrapbook (and maybe get going themselves).

Scrapbook Page Elements is an upcoming product from Get It Scrapped that provides a roadmap to the 5 parts of a scrapbook page so that you can made any kind of scrapbook page efficiently and well. Click here to receive early bird information and pricing when Scrapbook Page Elements becomes available.

“archival” scrapbooking in the 90s

When I began scrapbooking in the mid 90s (this was following the photo-albuming I’d been doing until then) I immediately learned that to scrapbook well, using supplies low in acid content was crucial for my photos’ assured long life. And I believed! Of course I believed: I have several of those peel-away albums (still) degrading my older photos.

There were several years during which I was “archival” compliant (kind of like ISO9000 compliant). And then . . . I got a digital camera and a color printer — and I could, thus, make scrapbook pages with photos I’d just taken. Still  I considered these home-printed photos temporary–I wasn’t really sure of the ink and the paper—and it seemed humidity could affect them. So I ordered professionally printed photos and subbed them in . . . as I had time.

The thing is . . . I stopped making time and many pages are still waiting for those professionally printed photos to be subbed in. Every once in a while I pull a few pages and start replacing the home-printed photos–but, dang!, if a lot of my old chipboard alphas aren’t falling off now. Sometimes I get them reaffixed. Other times I put them in a bowl with all of my strays, mostly confident I’ll remember which page they came from.

“archival” scrapbooking in 2010

What happened to me? Why did I let my archival guard down?

You probably know why: because of technology.

I left out part of my story above. Because I was publishing scrapbook pages in magazines for several years, I was scanning all of my pages. Not only was I scanning them—-I was opening them in Photoshop and dragging over DIGITAL versions of the photos so that the scanned pages looked as good as possible. With these scanned pages accumulating –and storing so nicely on my hard drive–I’ve started to lose my sense of urgency about fixing up the paper pages. They are what they are. They’ll last for . . . however long they last. . .and my archives? They’re digital now!

I now make both paper and digital pages, but I always make my paper pages 11.5″ x 11.5″ for easy scanning. And I make sure to scan at 300ppi. I make a variety of albums (either bound at Shutterfly or printed and slipped into page protectors) — and any of them can include any of my paper or digital pages.

When I think about how my family or I might view these pages in 10 years, I imagine it’ll be on something like a digital tablet.  Yet, really, I understand that it’ll be on something I haven’t even imagined–but I’m confident it’ll display digital images.

There might be someone who will appreciate my paper pages  in the future. . . or maybe not, but I’m no longer worried about my records decaying  — in the traditional way. The archival worry now is for the digital medium upon which I store my scrapbook pages. I keep my pages on my computer’s hard drive, and on an external hard drive, and I upload them to Shutterfly, and I use Mozy to back up everything offsite.

And I’m optimistic about the possibilities for preserving, mixing, and sharing all of my “scrapbooked” memories.

From my interview with Patricia Buckler, co-editor of The Scrapbook in American Life in 2006.

“Scrapbooking is not just a craft or a way to pass the time, but a serious activity designed to speak to the future about life as we know it,” says Buckler. The essays in her book are written by historians, librarians, and curators. Think about it: today’s scrapbook is tomorrow’s artifact. My favorite essay described “scrapbook houses,” which were made by girls and women between 1875 and 1920. They were self-contained worlds full of realistic and fanciful details as well as pieces of mass market magazine advertisements–what we would now call “collage albums.” Other essays look at the scrapbooks of a bordello madam, 19^th century medical practitioners, the author Willa Cather, children, and housewives.

Buckler’s advice to current-day scrapbook keepers is to “take to heart the importance of including not only photographs and decorations, but also the actual items that represent your experiences—like tickets, programs, certificates, corsages, wedding invitations, and birth announcements. Otherwise,” she says, “We will lose important artifacts about daily life.” She also encourages writing comments in your own handwriting so that your grandchildren will come to recognize it on other family documents.

Timeline of Scrapbooking/Memory Keeping in America

1^st century BC – 1^st century AD

The Early Greeks used koinoi topoi, or “places in the mind” as memory aids for recreating events and recalling info.

1350 (ish)

The gradual introduction of paper into Europe.

1450 (ish)

The advent of the printing press.

1550 (ish)

With the early Renaissance, artists and collectors preserved prints, bookplates, and other ephemera in albums to make them more available for public use.

1640 (ish)

The Commonplace Book was a blank book kept by both schoolboys and statesmen to gather notes for speeches and writing, and other fragments of memory.

1775

James Granger published a history of England with blank pages so owners could collect and add engravings. Thus, the “Grangerized” book came to mean a printed, bound book with blank pages to be personalized by each owner.

1837

With the invention of photography, photographs could now be put into the albums, and the variety of albums available widened.

1850 (ish)

A variety of patented photograph books and scrapbooks became widely marketed, with Mark Twain patenting and marketing his albums as “the only rational scrapbook the world has ever seen.” His book came with pages already coasted with mucilage, and others followed with improved bindings and methods that made pictures easier to manipulate. (1873)

1880s

Color printing technologies became available and there were a multitude of cheap, color images available to the general public. In the 1880s, there was a fad among U.S. children, especially girls, of making scrapbooks from  advertising trade cards, calling cards, religions verse cards and the decorative die-cut paper known as “scrap.” The public education movement commended scrapbook keeping as an educational and moral tool. (1880s)

The “snapshot era” was to begin with Kodak introducing lighter-weight print papers and rolled film.

1940

The emphasis in album keeping became more and more on photographs.

1975

A new and growing interest in genealogy created a resurgence of scrapbook keeping.

1980

The Christensen family displayed 50 family albums at the 1980 World Conference of Records in Utah. Soon after they wrote the book “Keeping Memories Alive” and opened The Annex, the first modern-day scrapbook retail store, in Spanish Fork, Utah. Many Mormon families, are required by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to document their family history. Because of the large Mormon population in Utah, many scrapping companies began there.

1990s

Improved technology allows scrappers to take digital photos, print photos at home, meet and share with other scrapbookers on the Internet and shop for supplies via the Internet. Scrapbooking’s popularity grows.

2000s

Weblogs begin to be used as a place to post thoughts, diary/journal details and photos.

Page layout software, affordable scanners and a variety of new printing options make digital scrapbooking possible. Photos, ephemera and embellishments are created using computer software, saved to a computer file, and stored in a digital album, and/or a printed for inclusion in physical album.

The features of online services like Flickr make online photo sharing and storage affordable and appealing.

Online services let you set up your own photo and video sharing website – your “virtual” scrapbook.

Technology has made it possible to easily and affordably replicate photos and scrapbook pages. You can:

• print and bind albums of scrapbook pages you have scanned and uploaded
  
• print and bind albums of scrapbook pages you have made digitally
  
• print individual scrapbook pages you have EITHER made digitally or uploaded (in a variety of sizes) and slide into traditional pocket albums
• use a service to “slurp” the writing and photos from an online blog and then print them in a bound book

The implication of this is that you no longer need to be scrapping albums for each family member page by page. You may now:

• print multiple copies of an album
• print customized variations of an album
• print multiple copies of a scrapbook page and then put together in a customized album.
• print albums and/or pages in different sizes for different people; i.e., 12×12 for your family album and 8×8 for the college-bound son or daughter.

Album pages can be:

• photos arranged in standard templates by your online retailer
• pages you have digitally scrapbooked
• pages you have scrapped with paper
• scanned and printed digital copies of scrapped pages

How are you making family and individual albums now? Has technology change your approach? What would you like to know more about?