The difference between a regular photo album and a scrapbook is
detail and love, say local scrapbookers
Scattered around Melisa Miner’s Morgan Hill home are about 30 different scrapbooks. She’s scrapbooked pictures of family vacations, her sons at play, her daughter’s birthday parties, her husband playing with the kids, and she’s even scrapbooked pictures of herself scrapbooking.
The albums have themed pages that are color coordinated and decorated with stickers, sparkles, plastic flowers, buttons, threads, small tags with sayings printed on them and other such items scrapbookers call “embellishments.”
Serious scrapbookers can spend hours and a small fortune on scrapbooking their pictures into albums. Melisa is one of those people, but her 14-year-old daughter, Amanda, recently made every ounce of scrapbooking energy worth it by pinpointing the thing at the heart of every completed album.
“My daughter recently told me how glad she was that I scrapbook,” Melisa said, pulling scrapbooks of her family off a large book shelf in her living room. “She said that some kids don’t even know what they looked like as babies, but she knows because she has all the scrapbooks I’ve done of her. I was saying that I stopped kidding myself that my kids were going to keep all the albums I’ve done, but Amanda said, ‘I’m definitely keeping mine!,’ and that made me feel so good.”
Scrapbooking originated as a method for people to safely preserve photographs, Miner said, which is what appealed to her in the first place. Older photo albums, such as the kind with glue-covered pages or the kind with some acid content in the paper used on the pages, can damage photos over time. Scrapbooking materials are generally acid-free and specially designed for safely mounting pictures in albums.
For Hollister resident Mandy Schneider, the appeal of scrapbooking is making her photos tell a story.
“I love taking all the pictures and putting them in themes on pages,” she said. “I think it makes looking at pictures way more interesting than just having them in a regular album. To actually make something out of them makes them more fun to look at.”
Mandy did a scrapbook for her husband, Tim, who is a Hollister firefighter. The album has a firefighter seal on the cover, and the pages are decorated with fire hydrant and engine stickers, hoses and other themed embellishments. For her scrapbook of pictures from the family vacation to New Orleans, she selected an album and embellishments reminiscent of Mardi Gras and the French Quarter. She also scrapbooks pictures of her two children as gifts for her mother, Frances Morales.
“I don’t think you have to do the special paper and all the embellishments in order to have a good scrapbook,” said Mandy, who has been scrapbooking since about 1995. “You can do a lot with stickers, stencils and a good imagination. For a lot of my early scrapbooks, I just cut the photos in shapes or I cut colored paper in shapes, and that’s about it. I only got into the more detailed stuff in my more recent scrapbooks.”
Melisa, who has been scrapbooking since the late 1990s, said her early scrapbooks are much simpler than her current creations, too.
“Scrapbooking has trends that come and go just like anything else,” she said. “When I started, it was really cool to use special scissors that cut patterns around the edges of pictures. Now I’m very into kits, which have themed paper and all kinds of embellishments to match. Sometimes I use them exactly how they come to me, other times I cut them or change them to make them more personal. It depends on my mood.”
Scrapbooking is also going high-tech. Some people are doing digital scrapbooks on their computers and bypassing albums altogether, Melisa said. And though Melisa enjoys and prefers the “touchy-feelyness” of shopping for and putting together scrapbooks in albums, she has used her computer to make them more creative, too.
In one scrapbook containing family vacation photos to Great America, Melisa used her computer to download the Great America logo and put her family members’ names in a circle around the logo. She then used her customized logo as an embellishment on one of her pages. She also included ticket stubs from their vacation, postcards and brochures.
“I get a few scrapbooking catalogs and magazines, and I refer to them all the time to get ideas and to figure out what I’m going to do with my pages,” Melisa said. “I use scrapbooking Web sites to shop and to get ideas, too.”
Both Mandy and Melisa said one of the highlights of scrapbooking is attending “crops.” Crops are social gatherings where scrapbookers get together and scrapbook.
You Got Memories, a scrapbook store in Gilroy, hosts several crops a month.
“We do crops a couple of Fridays a month during the summer, and we do them every Friday during the fall and winter,” said Wensday Wagner, one of the shop’s owners. “For $5, women bring their supplies and scrapbook, and we have snacks and sodas available. Crops are really popular because they’re kind of like the old-fashioned beauty salons where people get out of the house and socialize and meet new friends with a common interest.”
In some instances, scrapbooking goes beyond simply being a fun hobby. When Mandy’s grandfather-in-law passed away, she did a special scrapbook in his memory. The scrapbook was full of pictures of the man everyone called “Papa,” including old black and white photos of him as a young man and more recent photos of him with his great-grandchildren. Mandy’s two children each wrote special messages to their great-grandfather in the scrapbook, and the family keeps it as a memorial to their Papa.
Learn to Scrapbook
You Got Memories has several classes to choose from, depending on your skill level. The store is open regularly 10am to 6pm, and staff are always available to answer questions. Closed on Sundays.
– Beginners Classes: Held from 3 to 4pm daily. Just bring a few pictures to practice with. Cost is $5.
– Beyond Basics: Call to schedule an appointment. The class offers more in-depth lessons on paper trimmers and adhesive. Cost is $10
– Regular Classes: Held 6-8pm most Monday and Thursday evenings. Each class focuses on different themes, layouts and techniques. Cost is $15.
Scrapbooking Resources:
– You Got Memories: 280 E. 10th St., Suite A, in Gilroy between Rite Aid and Radio Shack. Call (408) 842-7003.
– www.scrapbook.com
– www.paperwishes.com
– Target stores
– Michael’s arts and crafts stores
– www.closetomyheart.com: Also provides contacts for representatives who come to homes for classes and to sell supplies.
– www.creativememories.com: Also provides contacts for representatives who come to homes for classes and to sell supplies.
The Cost
of Scrapbooking
Wagner said a beginning scrapbooker can get started for about $30, not including the cost of an album. This would include the cost of a paper trimmer, adhesive, probably a pencil, pen and some scissors.
Once you get the basics, you can do a layout for as little as $5, said store manager Flora Velasco. The store has several layouts posted , and many can be done for a minimal amount of money.
For those not on a budget, the sky is the limit in terms of how much one layout can cost. Mandy has a receipt that’s almost as tall as she is – and she’s 5 feet 8 inches tall – from a paper purchase she made at You Got Memories. She spent around $120 just on paper.
