Scrapbooking Today

Are you swimming in a sea of old photos? If you haven’t tried scrapbooking, you might be surprised by the vast resources available to help you get those photos sorted and put into albums. Just be careful. It can be addictive.

The rise in scrapbooking as a hobby may be explained by its ability to fill several basic human needs. It allows scrapbookers to express their creativity; it relieves stress, provides social interaction, and builds confidence and self esteem. Beyond all those benefits, scrapbooking also gets all those old photos into albums, a task that may have once seemed onerous, but is now a pleasure.

The surge in popularity that scrapbooking has seen in the past decade has resulted in an explosion of new products, tools and information. Scrapbooking stores can be found in cities across the nation, while the internet provides an abundance of scrapbooking websites, many of which have support message boards where experienced and novice scrapbookers alike can seek help, share ideas and show their work. Many scrapbookers attend classes or meetings, known as “crops” where they get together to build their scrapbook pages with others.

While crops can be great fun and provide useful information to the scrapbooker, they also serve to stimulate creativity and help motivation. The sharing of ideas can help scrapbookers come up with new and innovative techniques to help keep their work fresh and unique. The wide variety of tools and supplies available today also allow scrapbookers to totally customize their pages.

Scrapbook pages can be embellished with ribbons, brads, stickers, die cuts, vellum, beads, buttons and more. Craft stores feature aisles of printed and solid papers, in a variety of sizes, for use in scrapbooking. The popularity boom in stamp art has also found its way into the world of scrapbooking, allowing for even greater flexibility.

One of the most appealing aspects of scrapbooking is that the novice can start with a minimal investment in tools and materials. A blank album, scissors, adhesive, decorative papers, and some photos is enough to start with. Scrapbook designs can be as simple as rounding the corners on photos and placing them in frames in the album or as complex as pop-up pages with music, pockets, widows and more.

Exciting new machines like Cricut an Cuttlebug are just the tip of the iceburg, with better cutting tools, journaling pens and pencils giving scrapbookers the tools they need to design page themes to their exact specifications. With the variety of products available today scrapbooking can be a simple weekend hobby or an artform

So the next time you go to a fair, museum, amusement park or zoo, snap lots of pictures and be sure to save those tickets. You never know when the scrapbooking bug will bite you and those tickets will make great embellishments.