Yes, I am a major league scrapbooker. This is a mom thing that I do that is fairly conventional, although of course not all scrapbookers are moms. I have been an official "scrapbooker" since my kids were about 7 or 8 months old and I bought my first Creative Memories supplies. However, I have really been a scrapbooker all my life; I just didn't know it. I don't have a lot of scrapbooks from high school or college, but I do have some things that have been gathered and stand the test of time. And I'm certainly a packrat--how many of you have your program from your high school graduation, including all the names?
Lucille Ball was actually a major league scrapbooker in the days before we had acid free paper and pvc-free page protectors and before we talked about "adhesives" instead of "glue." She saved everything, and put it into detailed scrapbooks, particularly after she married Desi Arnez and before they had children. They were Childless for the first ten years of their marriage (or Childfree, the politically correct term that we used to use in RESOLVE because you aren't "less" just because you don't have children, kind of like being "differently abled.")
I don't know why they were Childfree in those days before Birth Control and Infertility Treatment and I haven't seen her biography on A & E in a long time so I don't remember if this is explained, but it doesn't really matter. They eventually had Lucy Arnez and Desi Arnez Junior, and there is a wealth of material, photographs, programs, etc. about their early life together and the founding of their production company Desilu. Now you may not care too much about "I Love Lucy" or think it's kind of silly, but you must admit that this show is an iconic part of television history. So it's great to have all of this old material and I think it gives us a much more accurate picture of Lucille Ball.
Now I'm not famous like Lucille Ball and I don't aspire to be. In fact, my daughter Miranda told me today that she wants to be rich but not famous because if you are famous "no one will leave you alone." Even the kids in her class have realized that being a celebrity, especially in this paparazzi and Internet and instant Twittering age, is not all it was once cracked up to be. Make a few little mistakes in your personal life like Tiger Woods--one little fender bender in your driveway at 2 am--and the whole sordid story of your marital infidelity is plastered all over the grocery store. No thank you. I don't think any of us are perfect enough to live up to media scrutiny for long.
So, why scrapbook? Why do I collect all these pictures of my kids as babies and in their Halloween costumes and such? I also have scrapbooks of our vacations and scrapbooks of Scarborough Faire. If I can ever decide how to approach the project I will eventually have some SCA scrapbooks (it's hard because there are so many events and my camera is just not very good for taking pictures at them, plus I get so busy that I forget. Others take wonderful pictures but I don't necessarily know all the people in the pictures).
After all, my kids don't look at the scrapbooks very often, and my husband NEVER looks. They used to be interested when I got back from cropping but I've done it so often now that they don't even care. I think that they have come to accept that it is a mom getaway and it's more constructive than BUNCO. R also was pleased when I first started doing it because it wasn't nearly as expensive as my collecting hobbies, although of course that was before they invented $50 Cricut Cartridges. Little does he know.
And I do indeed have tons of supplies. And I am not the worst, although I probably had the most at the crop today (and was missing a bunch of stuff, which is what happens when you don't repack your stuff after a weekend retreat). There was a lady there tonight who wanted to leave early so that she could run by Hobby Lobby to get some embellishments that another lady had at the crop. I said, 'are you really going to use those by Monday, or can it wait until Monday?' She said she wasn't going to use them but she doesn't shop during the week, so she HAD to get them TONIGHT! They might be gone by next weekend.
Now an embellishment, for the non scrapbookers out there, is a sticker or three-dimentional sticker or some sort of page decoration (for example, silk flowers or heart stickers or three dimenstional cheerleading jerseys or something of that nature). It goes with some pictures that you either have in your possession or that you know you took at some time in some year. And you have to get it NOW because when you finally get ready to scrapbook those pictures and you want a three-D red cheerleading jersey to go with them, you won't be able to find one. I am really not kidding about this. I know you men out there think I am, but I am deadly serious. Get your embellishments while you can. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
Robert Herrick would have made a great scrapbooker.
Now there are men who scrapbook but not very many. It's a chick thing. Of course some of it amounts to catching up with your friends and social networking, and sometimes it gets annoying when people start bragging on their kids or their trips to Bermuda or their new pools. So that's when you put on your Ipod, only I can't find that right now either.
The real point of it is to preserve your family heritage and your family history. For example, you put pictures of your child blowing out birthday candles in a high chair on a page or a 2 page spread (I always work in 2 page spreads but that's all the yearbook and newspaper training). You color coordinate the paper and embellishments (for this spread you need baby and birthday stuff, which is usually in bright colors like gold, red and turquoise for Disney Pooh or pastels for Classic Pooh. Pooh is a popular and unisex theme for first birthdays and we actually had a Disney Pooh birthday for the girls, not knowing we were being so conventional). Anyway, you cut the pictures and mat them and put them on great looking paper and add embellishments and journaling. Crop, Mount, Journal, Embellish, although a lot of us journal later or at home since that's the hard part for most people. Of course, I can write a paragraph and carry on a conversation at the same time, but I still add my journaling last. Don't know why but I just can't get around to describing what is going on until I know what the pages are going to look like and how much room I have. When I type up a bunch of narration in advance for a project, which I do for vacations in particular, the journaling ends up all through the book like a travelogue and it doesn't go with the pictures at all.
So, back to the Baby Pages. You write some trite little copy like: "Miranda enjoys blowing out her candles at her first birthday party! The Theme was Winnie the Pooh and Grandma made the awesome cake!"
Of course, you can imagine that I don't always write it quite like that. But sometimes I do when I am in a hurry and I am feeling lazy. You can write really profound copy if you try, however. Scrapbooking magazines mostly exist to sell paper, embellishments, and other products, but I have seen spreads and narration on suicide, cancer, post-partum depression, and a whole host of things that I don't really want to scrapbook. I actually don't want to write the really introspective stuff because it would be like this blog: I would start and go and go and go like the Energizer bunny. I have difficulty stopping. And I think that the blog is a better format for writing these introspective things anyway. Also, scrapbooking is history. Real, living history that is photo-based. The journaling is mostly important for the context of the photos, and for most of us, there is not enough space on a 12 x 12 page to put photos, embellishments, and lots of intropection; not unless we are using one photo per page like in the magazines. So we scrapbookers are somewhat shallow because we love playing with all the pretty paper and embellishments, and while the journaling is important, it is actually not the central focus. Creative Memories acts like it should be the central focus and they are probably right, but it's just not. Especially since most people can't write their way out of a paper bag, but even people like me are saying "what an awesome first birthday cake!!!" (GAG). It's true that sometimes I read these books and I do just want to gag ("Oh, _____, you are the sweetest little girl when you yawn.") I am sorry, but I can only go so far into Pleasant Valley Momdom--even I am not quite that shallow or sappy, even about my kids whom I adore.
Now I'm not saying that my kids' birthdays or your kids' bar mitzvahs or the Prom of 2010 is all that interesting in particular, but it is in fact living history. If you look at the pictures, you learn a lot about furniture, clothing styles, and values of the people who took them. All the focus on kid-oriented scrapbooking since the late 1990's says something interesting about our socieity: how kid focused we have become and how that affects what is important to us.
Of course, not everyone scrapbooks kids. My friend Patty and her husband Buzz just went on a cruise, and so she is scrapbooking that (Travel and Heritage are popular topics). She and Buzz don't have children but they have a lot of friends at their church, so she also scrapbooks church events, sometimes for herself and sometimes for the church (such as a welcome book for a new minister to help him meet people, or a farewell book as a gift for a minister who is transferring to another assignment). Her books also showcase old photos from her childhood (heritage) and tell us a lot about life in the 1970s and on, as well as about different locations.
Some people even scrapbook collections or hobbies, such as taking pictures of all the quilts they make for a scrapbook. This is because sometimes quilts are sold or given away, and the same sometimes holds true with other collectibles. Some of the different types of themes you can find in a scrapbook that is family oriented are: family yearbook, vacation, seasons, holidays, baby boy, baby girl, toddler, preschool, school days (elementary), middle school, high school (graduation, driving and prom), college,special activities such as dance, soccer, or even destination imagaination. You can scrapbook birthdays and times when you went to various places. You can be introspective and scrapbook the REAL truth about what is going on in your life (I don't do this because I don't always want my kids to read it). I even did a scrapbook as part of a Bible Study one time. We took the Proverbs verses about the virtuous wife who is more precious than diamonds, and scrapbooked how we fit in with or did not fit in with a more modern understanding of the Bible verse. You can do "faithbooking"--scrapbook pictures and use your bible to illustrate the pictures with biblical quotes.
It sounds like a lot of work and it is. It is more work than Golf. I can spend days doing this. I think I could even spend a week doing it but I'm not sure. Because when I do it, I am pretty intense usually. I am one of those annoying people who goes to retreats and gets 50 pages (or a whole large book) done. Of course, this only happens if I put in a number of hours on the front end getting ready for a retreat. If I get shortchanged like last time on my prep time, then I only get about 20 or 30 pages done at Retreat. Today I spent some more time putting together little snowman paper dolls, which has nothing to do with historic preservation but it sure takes your mind off your troubles.
And of course there is the shopping. There is a lot of purchasing products, looking on the Internet, checking out ebay, blogging about scrapbooking, doing yahoo groups on how to use the Cricut, etc. I've never gotten into this much--I'd rather do it than talk about it (kind of like sex). And there is a limit to how much shopping one can do on my budget, and I still can spend money in an extremely fast fashion (because when I was an attorney there was no time to shop, so I am a ruthlessly efficient shopper).
Some people have fancy bags or ribbon holders, or boxes for embellishments. I even have a cool box for the lucite blocks that I use for stamps. And if there was a fire, and the kids and the pets and the husband were OK, I want the photos and completed books first but I want all my supplies second. You can't get into heaven if you don't finish your scrapbooks! She who dies with the most supplies wins. I Scrapbook and there's nothing my husband can do about it. Camp Crop A lot. Eat, Sleep, Scrap. These are real t shirts, folks! It's a national obsession. The economy has hurt it some, of course, but people have always tried to do it cheaply on one hand, and lavishly on the other. Here, let me get a Cricut machine for $300 and some cartridges and I won't need to buy those expensive $4 embellishments. I can make my own. And I can make cards, and cut sheet vinyl, and all kinds of other cool things too.....in my spare time.
And there's the rub. There just isn't any spare time, especially around a house like mine. So we ladies buy all this stuff and then we haul it places for a few hours so we can get out of the house and crop. Some people do work at home on it but it is difficult to make it a regular habit. There is laundry, cooking, homework, cleaning, and activities and jobs that always get in the way.
But I think in the long run we are performing a valuable service, we historians with acid free adhesive and pvc free page protectors. We are preserving our own family memories for our children, but we are doing more than that. Some of these scrapbook pages will end up in the Smithsonian one day to show what live was like in these times. People don't write letters any more, just email, and I don't know how much email will be permanently archived. Phone calls aren't usually recorded (unless the FBI or police is involved or something else weird is going on). The scrapbooks, especially the regular old paper scrapbooks and not the digital ones on the pc, have the potential to represent our historical period.
Looking back on the ones that are 5 to 10 to 30 years old is the most important. I did a very small scrapbook with pictures from my grandmother's life one time. It starts about 1903 with a family portrait. Some of my pictures were color copies and were not that good, and I didn't have much from some periods of my grandmother's ife. My mom and I wrote the copy for it and she added stuff in later, so there are two different handwritings in it. It's not very fancy in terms of embellishments or paper used as it was one of my earlier ones. However, my grandmother looked at it before she died and though she had dementia, it did jog her memory ("I Had a photo just like this one !" she supposedly said--of course, it was a copy of her photo all along). When she passed away at age 99 a few years ago the first thing my mom wanted was for me to bring the scrapbook homs so it could be used in Nana's memorial service.
Once people are gone the photos are all we have left. I took photos at my nephew Will's wedding back in about 1995 or 1996. I have pictures of him with his grandparents the Naglys (now both deceased). I have pictures of Robert's Aunt Ruby and Uncle Arvelle (now both deceased). I have pictures of his Aunt Maurine, who is still very much alive and kicking, and Uncle Archie (he passed away this year). If I hadn't take these pictures and put them in a scrapbook, I don't know who would have done this and we would not have any semi-recent pictures of these people from our family.
There's a Lyle Lovett song: "We're all gonna be here forever. So Mama, don't you make such a stir. Put down that camera, and come on and join us, the last of the family reserve." It's about all the people in the family who pass away over time and how we don't realize it but our families are constantly changing over the years, and sometimes people who have passed on get forgotten.
So keep that in mind next time you want to throw out photos. At least label them and add some notes on the back (use a photo labelling pencil and not a ball--point pen or marker, which can soak through and also get on the fronts of other phtoos). If you have boxes, take a box a month and put some notes on the back for future generations. I am not saying that you need to scrapbook because if you aren't doing it already, you would have to give up something else in order to do it. And I am getting farther and farther behind because the SCA is now encroaching on my cropping life--somehow I need to find a way to do both and still deal with the day to day business of life.
But I hope that my hours and hours at this task will not be in vain. I know, I should be writing a novel or something, but then I can't play with the pretty paper!!
Pleasant Valley Mom, wanting to get back to the scrapbooking table and knowning that she really can't today
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment