Friday, June 14, 2013

Not Scrapbooking, Per Se

I love making scrapbooks.  Notice I didn't say I love "scrapbookING," which is an art form I have not mastered yet.  I am not really a true "scrapper" (to quote the lovable Blanche, from the must-see movie New in Town).
Scrapbooking is a relatively new craft, and I think it's totally awesome.  If it had been a craze back in my high school days, I would have been all over it.  I kept very basic scrapbooks, old-school style ones with beige construction paper pages and mementos taped or glued to them in a helter-skelter fashion.  My scrapbooks were not designer ones, to be sure--but I still have them and you can take a peek at what they looked like and what they contained by clicking on the link to this old post.

I kept scrapbooks for all of my boys, too: one for grade school, one for grades 9 through 11, and a special one dedicated completely to their senior year in high school.  While cleaning out the basement a few weeks ago, I came upon son #5's senior scrapbook, which I'd stopped working on when it was about 98% finished.  (I probably ran out of glue sticks, and one thing led to another...)  So I'm at work on it now, filling in the last chapters of his high school experience--graduation and the "Last Blast" after-party sponsored by his Catholic high school.
As you can see from this picture of my baby's almost-completed book of senior memories, my scrabooking style is no fancier now than it was back in the 70's.  But remember: I am the mother of  five SONS...and I don't think they'd be impressed by (or even notice!) all those little decorative doo-dads and add-ons, like buttons and bows and whatnot.

Do you keep scrapbooks?   And are they utilitarian, like mine, or are they Blanche-worthy?

8 comments:

  1. I LOVE scrapbooking! I have 4 weeks between school letting out and Summer Camp at work starting, so in that time I busied myself making scrapbooks. I remade one or two of them, then made (from start to finish) two more! I just love it. *smiles* My style depends on the content of the scrapbook. Some I deem worthy of lace and frills (not quite literally, but you catch my meaning), others are much more utilitarian.

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    1. I know, it is fun to put yhen together. And I love them all--plain ones and fancy ones. It's the pictures and mementos that matter most!

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    2. *them. (Sheesh--typing on an iPhone always leads to typos and strange auto-corrections.)

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  2. I hope I find the time to create scrapbooks for our kids as they get older, and I'm sure that when I do, they'll be very utilitarian. But it's the content that matters, in my opinion!

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    1. It took me a LONG time to get around to it. When the boys started school, I would just throw all their special papers in one huge cardboard box in the attic. It was that way for years, and then all of a sudden I realized if I didn't organize it, it would be too overwhelming to ever try to look at any of it. So I became a scrapper once again.

      But I think just getting a decorative memory box for each one and putting their memorabllia in it would have been a good plan (and easier, too, with less glue and tape involved--I wish I'd thought of that!). :)

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  3. For Erica: I got an e-mail saying you'd commented and I read it, but your comment didn't show up on the blog. (This has happened before with other comments and I'm not sure why.)

    If there had been blogging back when my boys were growing up, I think I totally would have used it in place of scrapbooks! Half the reason I do it now is to record family memories, history, etc. for them. And there are no glue sticks involved! :)

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  4. I make a baby book of their first year through Shutterfly, and then a blog book each year. That's it, no time for scrapbooking, but I do admire people that do it!

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    1. A yearly blog book would be AWESOME! I wish sometimes that there'd been blogging back when my boys were young! I'll bet your family loves going through those.

      My sister makes memory books of our family reunions for my parents every year using Shutterfly. I've never used it, but I'd like to give that a try.

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