pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

The Questions then…some more scrapbook-relevant than others, but I did promise!

Are you singing in the opera??
Um, yes. It seems like a lifetime ago, but my first degree is in that ever-so-useful-for-a-lifetime-of-employment field of musical theatre. So I did a little opera. But I didn’t get to wear a viking helmet. Clearly I took this personally.

Can anyone evolve into a better scrapper?
Everyone can evolve. Evolve means change for the better, right? So the most important thing to think about if you’re consciously trying to evolve is Do I like this better? rather than Is this how it’s supposed to be? We don’t scrapbook to stress ourselves out. We scrapbook for fun. So the second it’s not fun, well…change it up and make it fun again.

I’ve been thinking about this one since you asked and come up with a bit of an evolution crib sheet, if you will.

Find a layout you love in a magazine, online, from a friend…and copy it almost entirely. Just for you, just as an exercise. Keep the example in front of you until the layout is entirely finished. The point in copying it is to feel how the layout comes together when you’re creating in a different style. Then find a second layout (in a similar style or by the same artist) and this time just use it as inspiration. Replicate just one thing or start with the same products. Only refer to the example to find the elements you’ll replicate, then put the example away and finish the layout with your own creativity. You get two layouts for your albums while discovering the differences between layouts you currently like and what you make naturally…which then gives you something to think about and reinterpret on your own. Evolution throughout the entire craft often comes from reinterpretation—especially since we are largely making unique things from the same set of base materials.

Take a class. Even if you teach classes, take a class now and then. If you’ve never taken a class, find one that sounds good and sign up. Classes vary in price, so you can still take a class even with just a small investment. If you’re lucky enough to find a class nearby, take one in person. If there’s nothing available in your area, take a class online. A good class can bring back energy and make you look at things a little bit differently. And it’s the kind of learning that is stress-free. And you might make a new friend, since the room will be filled with like-minded scrapbook-loving girls.

Look outside the album. Start taking inspiration from other visual fields. Illustration, interior design, nature, architecture. If you don’t feel like scrapping, do something else creative. Something old or something new. Look at things differently, use different materials. Then when you come back to paper, it will be new again and there will be something a little different in the way you create.

Go take pictures. Nothing makes me want to scrapbook more than lovely new photographs.

Change your routine. If you usually scrap late at night because you can scrap as long as you want, try scrapping in the morning when you don’t have unlimited time. If you normally scrap in a well-stocked room of supplies, try taking just the basics into another place. Scrap at Starbucks or on a picnic blanket. Switch up your music habits. Just change the environment and see if it changes the creativity.

There is a lot about things like this in the online class I am teaching this summer (more details very, very soon) so I will leave it there before I go on too long and give it all away. But the short answer: YES. If you want to make things differently, you can. The important thing is that you don’t have to change.

Do cheerleaders really have cheerleading PJs?
Well, yes. It is so hard to talk about cheerleading with a straight face as an adult, but as a teenager on the squad at my school, it was very serious business. The squad was selected in the spring for the next year. While the rest of the school had the entirety of June, July and August for their holiday, we had practice Monday to Friday, usually first thing in the morning. All gearing up for cheerleading camp, where we would head off to a university campus with a gazillion other squads from other schools for a week of non-stop cheering, learning routines, stunts, jumps and all that crazy stuff. No one can understand how much hard work that week is unless they have been there, because come on—cheerleading? Hard work? It’s not the first thing people think of really. But you do not learn how to hold your friends over your head (literally) without some sort of strength, endurance and practice. So anyway, with so many girls there, you have to be in matching clothes at all times so your squad can be identified. So each year we would have to choose and buy several matching outfits, right down to the socks and hair-ties. Usually last year’s practice clothes then became that year’s pajamas, so even when we were in the dorms we could quickly be identified as a squad. Seriously. A whole other world.

I wonder though, for myself mainly, if scrapbooking is going back to the “original” form in some ways for me. By original, I mean including magzine snippets, and things I find that appeal to me. It almost seems full circle. Only with the inclusion of much better products.
Okay, not really a question, but I wanted to point it out. I think you’re absolutely right. The stuff of life is what gives the photos their value. No amount of articles I read about getting rid of clutter will make me start throwing away ticket stubs, for instance. If they were stacking up on a table or even a desk drawer, I could see the point. But if I stick them in my album once a month in a ‘what we did this June’ type layout, then I am much happier and they aren’t taking up any real room or creating a mess. Of course, I do think that those of us who are drawn to scrapbooking are often more nostalgic than those who don’t get it. That very first album I made had a very nostalgic packet of lemonade, and even now I am sure the design on the packet has changed…more so in fifty years.

Do you keep your LOs in order of when you scrapped them, or in order of event/photo?
Oh goodness, I’m so guilty when it comes to organisation. But actually it’s not too bad at the moment. Pages I scrapped pre-2004 live in albums on a bookshelf in our spare room. Pages from 2004 to now live in American Crafts Modern Albums in my studio. Some books are themed and some are roughly chronological. I love that the 3-ring binders mean I can move things around if I want to. But working for the magazine makes it a little difficult to keep things in order, since those pages get sent away for several months and then come back all at once and I will admit I don’t normally have the discipline to figure out where they go in an album. So…I have a staging area. A spot where they are safe to sit until I have a day when I go through and sort them all out. Everything is in a page protector or a 12×12 zip bag in the waiting stage and it’s completely out of the light. About once a month I sit down and find the right place for them to go in the album. I tend to do it on the day after a deadline, when there’s that bit of breathing space. So I guess the answer is that for the most part, my pages are eventually in chronological order! They just may take some time to get there. I have some themes pulled out into their own albums, like Christmas and Home and Travel (that’s the one you can see there). But if it doesn’t fit into those, it goes chronological for now. But remember, there are just two of us so I don’t have that complicated balance of albums for each child or anything. Not yet, anyway!

Do you ever go back to old LOs you don’t really like and remake them, or maybe just make another page with the same photos?
I don’t remake old layouts. If a layout goes wrong, I can normally tell halfway through that I’m not going to like it and no matter what I do to it, I’m not going to like it. I just finish it and move on. Clear the slate. Start again. As for old pages that look tacky now just because trends have changed…I figure if I remade them the same thing would happen and I’d be caught in an endless circle, so still no.
I have scrapped the same photo more than once on occasion…sometimes to meet an assignment, sometimes because it fits two themes when linked with other photographs, sometimes because an idea pops into my head and that particular picture just seems the best option. Sometimes I have photos that are just useful to print more than once to fill gaps. But personally, I don’t rescrap on purpose.

If you were to encounter that lady with that question today, what would your answer be to her?
I’ve thought about this one a great deal over the years and it would have to start with a deep breath and ‘I’m sorry, but I have to disagree.’ I would tell her that I value the documenting of everyday life because I enjoy it, first and foremost. And that some of my silliest, earliest memories, like my great-grandparents teaching me to play rummy, are of everyday life. And yet I don’t know how my great-grandparents came to play rummy. But that someday, if I do decide to have children, I may teach them how to play rummy. And all of that will be everyday stuff—not weddings or births—and it will be the stuff that makes life important to me. And if I don’t have children, I will still find it important to take photos of things like playing cards and cups of coffee if only to map out my own personal journey in my own personal scrapbook which I make in my own personal time. Because I love it. And it would probably end with ‘And I think I have to go catch my train right about now.’ Perhaps.
I would try really, really hard to not throw in a gut-wrenching-generation-X comment like ‘Well the choice was between scrapbooking and robbing innocent grandmothers on the street, and before today, I thought I had made the right choice.’

I promise.

xlovesx

Comment [14]

Somewhere in the brown phase.

Oddly enough, it has taken me far more time to compile this last section of the time warp—it turns out that the earlier years are easier to summarise, where there were fewer changes, but each more noteworthy, while the last five years have been full of lots of small steps adding up. And yet to me it seems like there has been very little change in the last few years. Perspective is a funny thing. Suffice to say: this is a long post. I had originally had the Q&A at the end of this but there is no way anyone would read for that long, so it is relegated to tomorrow, along with the little project I wanted to share that brought all of this about in the first place.

I took a break at the beginning of 2003, though I didn’t quite notice it at the time. I was busy with a promotion at work and wasn’t scrapping for publication. One notable exception was a last-minute call to teach at a big event in the UK where I filled in for an American teacher who wasn’t able to fly over. I had just a few days to look at the class kit and the teacher’s powerpoint slides and try to make sense of it all, but it seemed okay in the end. Teaching someone else’s class is an immense challenge…it felt like learning a new language to me: a challenge with a great reward, but nothing makes sense for a very long time!

More…brown.

What I was doing in my little retreat from my scrapbooking supplies was hanging out with my art journal. I have kept art journals off and on since the age of fourteen but I never show them to anyone. For me, scrapbooks are there for public consumption (even if that just means future generations or guests in our house) but journals are not. I don’t keep the majority of them. For me, they are a place to work out thoughts and ideas and masterplans. When I am in a journal phase, I will write and write and write and while I am drawing or painting in the same book, I am thinking over what I have written. I think writing in a journal is one of those things that is linked to your personality type—it has to do with introspection and the way you think. In teaching students to write, I was always quietly shocked by those who didn’t hear the words in their head when they read, wrote or thought. I would normally ask if they thought in pictures or colours—sometimes yes, sometimes no. I think in words and pictures. Constantly. Words a bit more, because I can think in words more quickly than I can put the pictures together. But the students who thought in neither…they were a cause for concern for me. I can’t imagine how that would work. So anyway, my years of spirit-levelled graphic design scrapbook pages were pretty much over as I wrote and drew in loopy-de-loops and ink droplets in my journal. Of course, I didn’t really know the two were linked at the time.

Are we seeing a trend here?

Halfway through 2003, there was cause for excitement. After a few false starts from various places, there was a real plan for a UK-based scrapbooking magazine. I started working on the project as the ‘artistic designer’, which made me sound like an art editor but I really didn’t have any part in that stage of the production. Of course, when you join a team working on the early stages of a project like that, you have blinkers and don’t see everything else going on around you, and in the time that we were in production stages, other UK magazines were in production too. And having only worked on magazines that already existed and had regular publishing routines, I never realised how long it would take from the initial offer to join the team until we saw the first issue. A million things would happen in life between the two.

Let’s see…what colour goes with red? Oh, I know! Brown!

Over the course of 2003…
I stopped buying supplies and made do with what I had amassed, as I left the world of the Local Scrapbooking Store.
I went from the cupboard under the stairs to my own flat, complete with a second bedroom dedicated entirely to artsy-craftsy things. Strapped for cash after paying the security deposit, I only bought the furniture one needs. So out with the idea of a television and a sofa; in with an adjustable drafting table and shallow drawer unit for supplies. Obviously.
The influences of art journals and the magazine meant I was working more on single page layouts and small themed albums—which today I am sure we would just call minibooks.
Every.single.thing.I.made used dark earth tones. You can spot one of these layouts in my album in a second from all the brown and dark green and brown ink and even sand glued on the pages. And a fair bit of acrylic paint, but even that is in earth tones. There is no happy colour for the entire year and part of the next.
I worked on far too many circle journals than could keep one person sane. Most were organised groups, but there was also a database on a website I joined at this point where you could list your address and people would send you a journal to work in, with no warning. Most of them were quite fun, but some were very dark, so I eventually left the project.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Brown has left the building!

One very, very important part of my scrapbooking style came from that move and the choice of what to buy when I needed to furnish an empty apartment from scratch. I didn’t buy a printer. So I had to handwrite my journalling on layouts. I had no other option. Once I let go of the stress of messing up a page and stopped pencilling in all my writing to trace over it with a pen…and once I found smaller tipped pens to write with…everything clicked into place. Suddenly the writing on my layouts was my actual day-to-day writing, not some stilted print where I tried to make it perfect yet it inevitably looked wrong. Never again would I spend ages typing in my text and measuring the space on the layout and printing a draft and holding it up to the light to see if it will fit and changing the font and the margins and everything else. From then on, I would just pick up the pen and write until I ran out of room. This is the moment that I took stress out of scrapbooking for me. For my pages, the pen is mightier than the printer, indeed.

Well, almost. It took some time (and some vintage paper) to finally shake the earth tones from my system.

While still working on the magazine, which was alternately slow-going then very fast paced, I did something that felt totally unexpected that spring and took up a challenge from an art group to make one piece of art every day for a month (that may have been the easy part) and sell it on ebay (the hard part!). That was a collage series called Guide Words, with each piece created on top of a page from a discarded school dictionary. The first few that I listed had me worried, as they sat there with no bids until someone would pay for them right at the last minute…but by day four, there was promise. All thirty pieces sold. The winning bids varied from piece to piece—from $10 to $100. I had never really shared non-scrapbook art work before, so this was a huge step for me. They sold to a variety of people—some I knew, some I didn’t—and three were sold to galleries. I didn’t know what to do with myself, this was so amazing to me.

Also, should I mention that I had met The Boy one month before I started Guide Words? So although I still didn’t own a sofa, life was still pretty good.

More good: Guide Words became my first online class. Fifteen of us collaged together and shared our work step-by-step, with participants in the US, Canada and the UK. Fourteen ladies and one man. All the prompts back then were plain text emails, sometimes with a picture attached to the message, but mostly it was about reading the instructions and interpreting them in your own way. We all made one collage together during a live chat, which was hilarious. You could just imagine getting paint on your keyboard and I don’t think a single one of us owned a webcam.

Colour and grunge start to collide.

Joanna Campbell-Slan asked me to help judge the first ever Best of British competition, along with Mary Anne and Bev of UKScrappers. Opening each envelope was great fun and we discovered some talented scrappers who came to be great friends. It felt like the UK industry was starting to become real, as if it had just been a velveteen rabbit in the past. Mary Anne and I also worked on a book for beginners that summer.

Scrapbooking Memories & More finally debuted in the summer of 2004, and we spent a fair amount of time out and about promoting it while we were also working on the next issue. I had my own column, Finding your Voice, that featured pages and projects but always with a journalling angle. Interestingly, when I googled to find the press releases about the debut issue, there was a survey on the CHA website asking if scrapbooking was past its peak and going to crash from there on out. In 2004. Interesting because the same questions are being thrown out today in 2008, only with the words ‘due to the recession’ tagged on at the end. I find it interesting that some of the biggest voices in the industry thought 2004 could be the dying days. The industry changed then. It’s changing now. Change doesn’t mean the end. Anyway, we had three issues in 2004—summer, autumn and the Christmas issue. It wasn’t perfect, but we believed in what each of us was making and writing and the emails we got from readers made us think we were doing the right thing, even though it was taking a great deal of time without knowing where it would go.

December 2004 was the very first year I ran Journal your Christmas online. We had about sixty participants that first year, and all the prompts were plain text. It was a project where I could see more and more that I could do as each day went on, so I hoped I could build it a bit more the next year. Who knew?

In 2004…
Just two big changes. All handwritten journaling.
And at the very end of 2004, I finally went digital. The Boy bought me a Canon 300D for Christmas and I pretty much fainted in delight. I had been bad-mouthing digital for four years, refusing to go from film SLR to point-and-shoot digital, and not being able to afford a DSLR. So oh goodness, crazy amounts of photos, here I come.

Now, layouts in colour. A turning point!

The next year started with confusion: I went to the CHA trade show in Atlanta for the very first time, partly for the Best of British book launch, partly to report for the magazine. But came home to find the magazine had closed abruptly, which was a smack in the face. But good things followed: Guide Words was published as a book. Several of us went on to join Scrapbook Inspirations, published every four weeks with real deadlines and real art editors. My first layout with SI is this floral one in issue three—August 2005.

Online classes became my pride and joy, and they weren’t always scrapbook based. That year we did a lot of mail art and minibooks. The girls at the post office started to learn that when an oddly shaped item arrived with stamps stuck to it, it was probably for me. But we were still in plain text email stage at this point. It wasn’t until Christmas 2005 that I upgraded to PDF files.

I flew to the states to teach at two Creating Keepsakes conventions. I learned so much I could never write it all down.

And most importantly, I learned to embrace colours that were not avocado green and java brown. Shocking.

From then to now…
I continue to work with Scrapbook Inspirations.
I’ve grown my online classes to include guest artists and numbers of participants I never would have thought possible, while staying the one-girl-indie-business.
I went to CKU again. For fun. It was lovely.
I upgraded my camera. And seriously upgraded my lifeplan, which had previously read more along the lines of ‘live alone for all eternity’.
After an entire year of battling with the idea in my head of what I was really supposed to be doing with my life, I resigned from my teaching position to scrapbook full time. Thankfully the leap of faith worked and more good things came along: lots of teaching opportunities; meeting amazing people in my classes that have taught me so much; seeing places I’ve never been. All of which will make me a better school teacher when I eventually go back to that role. And designing my own range of product for Banana Frog? Very, very cool.

From 2005, yet still very true.

I am still all about real colour, still about handwritten journalling, still about telling my own story.

And still very much loving the entire idea of scrapbooking. I am very grateful for those paper dolls and viking opera singers and plastic shape templates of yore, for without them, my life would be entirely different.

I promise that is the end of the schmaltz. I can’t help it: from where I sit today, it’s true.

xlovesx

Comment [16]

Friday night commitments kept, and now we’re back to the time warp and we’re up to 2002. And this is the project I mentioned earlier that brought me bouncing out of my scrapbook burn out.

You may have gathered that it was not always the done thing to scrapbook about yourself, but if you weren’t there at the time it’s hard to imagine just how outrageous it was. Before I had met many scrapbookers in the UK, I went along to a crop organised by a few representatives from a direct-marketing scrapbook retailer—we are rewinding a bit here to late 1999, I should think. Seated around a table of strangers, I had brought one of my albums and my scrapbook basics and some photos and expected to scrapbook at my very first crop. In getting started, the ladies at my table looked through my album and started asking me questions about my supplies and telling me there was no way that they could be photo safe and such…one went as far as to say there was no way to to make acid-free patterned paper. But really they were more interested in the fact that I was scrapbooking pictures of myself. And then the queen of subtlety had finally had enough.

“If you’re not married and you don’t have any children, then what do you have that’s worth putting in a scrapbook?”

In their favour, it was not the representatives who said this but one of their top customers. This was before I had ever been published (and these girls didn’t know of scrapbooking magazines anyway) and before I had much self-confidence in anything, much less scrapbooking. So while today I would retort with a mix of anger, education and careful wording, then I just cowered and cried. She may have thought she was asking a real question, but all I heard was the bit about my life not being worthy of a scrapbook page. Ouch.

So a few years later Angie Pedersen, who lives in the same city where I grew up but I didn’t meet until I lived in England, asks me to contribute some pages and ideas to the project she is working on, The Book of Me, and it’s like the perfect little moment designed to help other girls who may have sat at a crop and been spoken to without thought and left to think they were not worthy of a scrapbook page. Brilliant. It was such a dream to work on that project, getting to see the drafts and things come together, email by email. It felt like important work, and it was probably the first time I felt empowerment in scrapbooking and grasped on to a bigger meaning for paper and glue. There was also a surprise when my copy arrived: on the Amazon page you can see the original draft of the cover, but the final cover ended up with the image above—I had no idea that I would be on the cover and it just about made my year. I love that it was a layout that marked a real change in my pages as well—it’s a single page, a 12×12 page, it’s a bit more arty, it’s sparkly, uses an enlarged photo and everything is in my own handwriting. The year before, that would have been a page I guessed would have been kicked back from publication. To see it on the cover made it feel like it was ahead of its time, perhaps. And it’s one that hasn’t really dated—I’m still quite happy with that little snapshot.

As part of that project, I also started to field a lot of questions from people who I think had shared my thoughts but were too afraid to say anything at the time. Because the pages that graced the magazines usually had beautiful pictures of traditional families, it was often a little awkward to scrapbook something that wasn’t as perfect as a storybook. After several people asked me how I dealt with this in my albums, I wrote this article for Angie’s mailing list. To my knowledge, it was the first time something was published using the phrase “hidden journalling” (though there may very well be other sources first that I didn’t know about). To this day, when I see people talk about hidden journalling, I light up a little bit. Other people say it much better. I still think it’s an important moment to realise you are in control of your pages and you can decide what is seen, what is said and how much effort it takes to read your thoughts. I still think of that as my little contribution to the big world of scrapbooking…just to give a few people the push they needed to put something in writing when they felt it was too imperfect to be remembered. I love that this is a whole branch of the industry now and it’s not taboo to write what you feel. We’ve grown up a lot in the last ten years, haven’t we?

The other big event of 2002 was CKU. My friend Cheryl and I flew to the states to go to one of the first CKU events. We took classes with Becky Higgins, Stacy Julian, Lisa Bearnson, Rhonda Solomon, Tracy White and other crafty girlies. There were some quite stressful moments that weekend but I mostly remember the good stuff. I had never been in a room with so many scrapbookers before, and that alone was pretty magical. It was the first time that I actually met scrapbookers from magazines and it made me very shy and nervous and giggly. But I came home and scrapbooked pretty much every photo I had taken within a week or two, so I must have been pretty inspired. This page included.

So, the facts then…
In 2002:
I shopped at the few scrapbooking stores that had started to spring up in the UK. Hurray!
I still scrapped a la Harry Potter, under the stairs in the middle of the night, though I did go to about one crop a month.
My camera was still the Rebel 35mm. I bought my first zoom lens in 2002—a 28-200 that I found on sale.
I had pretty much transitioned entirely to 12×12, and I started to do some single page layouts, though the vast majority were still double page spreads.
At the beginning of the year, I was still very much about the cardstock. By the end of the year, I was quite liking distressed looks, so there was a bit of subtle patterned paper creeping in along with cardstock that had been wet, crumpled and ironed.
After several years of saying ‘I will not start stamping because I will have to buy so much more stuff’...I started stamping. And I bought so much more stuff. Maybe it was inevitable.
I started blogging, though my blog was nothing like this and was mostly written to a private audience of friends and most of my entries were me whining about something or another. I guess, like scrapbooking, my blogging went through an evolution between then and now.
I still typed most of my journalling.
I started putting quite a few interactive elements on my pages, often to cram more photos or words onto the page; other times to include hidden elements I didn’t want to put right at the front.
I finally bought a paper trimmer! Took me long enough, I know. It still works today too, which is a pretty good return on a £15 investment.
My favourite supplies were sparkly things like stickles and glitter pens, though I often thought they were too special to actually use.
I didn’t scrapbook nearly as many pages in 2002 as I did the year before…partially because my year of magazine contract was up and more because my day job had become very real and took up much of my time and energy. It felt worthwhile and important to spend as many hours as possible working at school. Which strangely enough, was a pretty important step in my development as a scrapper.

A more modern tribute to the pages of 2002: a stack of photos held in place with brads and typed journaling—albeit on my old typewriter rather than the computer. I’m still not going back to that.

And I think I can wrap this up in just one more post, believe it or not. So stop back for the final installment: a whirlwind of the last five years.

(Also, a few people have emailed some excellent questions as a result of this little series of meanderings and I am going to try to put together a Q&A post for the beginning of next week. If you have a question you’d like me to include, please just let me know and I’ll do my best.)

xlovesx

Comment [16]

Gotta hit the pause button for a short moment because the hours have run away from me today (or rather, they got stuck in traffic)...

Please forgive me but I think we will move on to 2002 nice and early tomorrow morning with a bit of luck (and a lot less traffic). It’s on its way, I promise!

xlovesx

Comment [1]

It may be Thursday, but it’s still Time Warp week. And we’re up to 2001: A Scrapbooking Odyssey. And while it wasn’t a year of my life filmed by Kubrick, it was a pretty shocking year for me in scrapbooking terms.

In 2000, I put together an entry for CK’s Hall of Fame but never sent it in. Don’t worry: it was filled with many paper dolls. Back then you had to select your eight best unpublished layouts to be considered. And I actually just enjoyed going through my albums to find my eight favourites, so I decided I would do that every year and keep a copy of my little ‘entry’ so I could see how I changed as a scrapbooker. Except in 2001, I got up the nerve to actually send the entry in. I was really, really hoping to get an honourable mention. I thought that would be a fabulous achievement and then I could enter the next year with a bit more respect and maybe someday I might make it, but that was really a pipe dream. I really, honestly just wanted to be forced each year to select my eight layouts, print them out on index cards and keep them as a little highlight scrapbook. Except CK went and thwarted my plan.

I am very, very glad they didn’t record the phone calls with the winners then like they do now. It would be so cringeworthy. But screechy phone calls aside, I was shocked and thrilled to win. And I knew some other girls that won that year (well, I knew them online, through a scrapbooking forum) and that was lovely. And I knew some people who entered who I thought should have won and didn’t, and that wasn’t very lovely. But then there was the second phone call that made 2001 the most confusing year of my life. A phone call from Paperkuts magazine asking me to be on their Power Team. So all of the sudden I went from having the odd paper-doll page published to actually making pages just for articles, and no matter what year that happens, it is strange. You take this thing that you’ve done just for fun and now it’s serious and it’s going to be judged and it’s so hard not to take any criticism personally.

And there was a lot of criticism back then—one scrapbook forum that was pretty popular had an entire section dedicated to issue reviews, and as soon as the new issues hit mailboxes, posters would go through page by page and offer commentary on the entire issue, layout by layout. Sometimes they would say nice things, sometimes they would say funny things and other times they would be downright cruel. I wasn’t very thick-skinned then and I wasn’t about to fight my corner, so I inevitably read what they had to say and any criticism would really affect my scrapping, from just not using a certain colour of paper to being unhappy with a week’s worth of layouts. Trends were moving very quickly as the industry started a huge growth spurt, and there was a lot of pressure to keep up with products, improve photography and make each page a masterpiece.

The funny thing is that when I look back on the layouts from that year, they are actually the most timeless in all my albums. When I look at them now, I think they are quite plain, but because this was just before so many products expanded across the US and came to UK shores, there isn’t much trend involved. CK published seven of my layouts in the Hall of Fame book: all double page spreads; all entirely cardstock. Well, one had a bit of patterned paper but it was the most subtle patterned paper ever so really, even that looked like all cardstock. (Interestingly enough, I did send in layouts with patterned paper, pop dots, metal embellishments and even cinnamon sticks, but the seven that made it into the book were the seven that were as minimal as I ever made.)

See what I mean? Really simple. Lots of wide-open space (sometimes in odd places like this layout) and the vast majority of the page space is either photos or empty expanses of cardstock. And although it doesn’t have the punch of today’s minimalist-graphic-styled scrappers, there’s nothing here that I can make fun of. The paper dolls were gone. Stickers and cheesy titles were pretty much gone. I was just about cardstock and photographs. My supply lists by each layout were so very short. But there’s just nothing there to offend. It might not grab your attention, but this is the point in my albums where I don’t look at the pages and laugh. The first concrete step of my evolution.

The trouble was that this was the point of my evolution of style that I became a scrapbook academic. I no longer played with pretty paper. I didn’t take the time to make fun little doo-dads and play with silly designs like paper dolls. I didn’t buy products I thought were too ‘fluffy bunny’, and I made my pages with a pencil, a ruler and a spirit level pretty much all the time. I had taken a few courses in page design for newspaper and magazines while I was in college, and I started abiding by those principles, more or less. At one point, I actually got out my old textbook and reread it with a highlighter and tried to invent my own formulas for scrapbook page design. It seemed like if this was going to be work (and it certainly wasn’t my full-time job but getting assignments and deadlines sounded like work to me), then I needed to treat it like work. Every once in a while I would try something out of my box for an assignment and inevitably it would get kicked back for me to do something in all cardstock or maybe with one sheet of patterned paper, but never, ever two. So back to work with the cardstock I went for a solid year of magazine issues. I also started teaching little classes at a monthly crop—and the supplies were usually just cardstock with the odd bit of thread or chalk. I remember teaching a little three-stitch triangle tree as part of a Christmas page and having several scrappers in the room look at me as if I had three heads when I gave them a needle. All of them still scrap, and I guarantee they have needles in their tool kit right this second.

One of two layouts from today looking back on pages from 2001: a bit of sewing things into a pocket of vellum and embracing wide open space.

In 2001…
I basically shopped at my own scrapbook store. Long story, but suffice to say I had plenty of Bazzill cardstock to hand.
I scrapped at a desk under the stairs, not unlike Harry Potter. The desk was too small to have both pages of a two page layout side by side, so I would do one side then walk into the hall to hold them side by side and see how they looked. I swear it didn’t seem strange at the time. I still scrapbooked in the middle of the night—sleeping wasn’t a particular talent of mine.
I kept my scrapping supplies in a Crop-in-Style Navigator rolling tote (which also went with me on the train and crossed the Atlantic a few times) and in the desk drawers. But I no longer kept a paper stash at all.
I used my Hall of Fame prize money to buy a Canon Rebel 35mm SLR camera. It was my pride and joy. But often I didn’t have the photos I needed for assignments, so I was constantly borrowing pictures from other scrappers just so I could get the ‘work’ done.
I still only did double page spreads, but I had to scrap a mixture of 12×12 and 8.5×11 for assignments.
I wrote a great deal on most of my layouts, usually typed on the computer and printed out. All of the journalling was very much like factual reporting—all told in complete sentences in chronological order without the slightest attention to lyricism. If I put the pages together, I have a near-complete commentary of where I went and what I did for an entire year, but not the slightest notion about how any of it made me feel.
I designed almost all of my pages by holding my photos in front of a rack of cardstock and choosing three colours that coordinated—one light hue, one medium tone and a dark shade. And at crops, I helped choose sets of three colours for other scrapbookers. Sometimes people even posted me their photos in the mail and I would pick three colours and post it out to them. I had a real job, but when I wasn’t doing that, I was thinking in cardstock colours.
I made about 150 layouts that year—for some reason, I kept track. Two-thirds of them were published. A big handful of the rest were for classes. And all of this made me absolutely ecstatic for about ten months, before I came crashing down in the last two.

Every single layout in my hall of fame entry used colour blocking in some way…although without any patterned paper. I had a little try today to see if I could still make colour blocking with with patterned paper and pretty edges. Does it work? It’s not amazing but I quite like it. Will product and style date this more than cardstock and a spirit level? Probably. But not quite like paper dolls. I have some more theories to share about that soon.

So the conundrum: the pages I made that year are probably the ones that will date the least. And I had to pinch myself every day because people were paying me to scrapbook, which was nothing short of amazing. But by the end of year of scrapping like that, I was totally burnt out. What’s a girl to do?
Never fear…there was something entirely new in 2002 that brought all the good back. Shall we talk about that tomorrow?

But looking back at these layouts, there is one last thing I have to say about 2001 before we move on. I really think it took three to four years of scrapping for me to develop any sort of consistency. When new scrappers pick it up these days, I think they are brilliant from their very first layout because it often seems to me that they are developing their own style quite quickly. And sometimes, they are. Lucky girls! But to those of you who are relatively new and don’t feel like you’ve caught your style just yet, I felt lucky to find it in four years. And all I’ve done since then is change that style to something totally different. So if we did this retrospect again in ten years, it might look like it took me eight or ten years to develop any style. It’s all relative. And it’s all part of the fun.

Don’t worry about the scary being over just yet: I think I can still find a fright or two in the albums to come.

xlovesx

ETA: closing comments on this one as it seems to be target of the day for spamville.

Comment [7]

Moving on then. On to the year 2000. A new millennium that brought us bugs and life was supposed to look like an X-Files spin-off and my scrapbook pages? They looked like this.

(Wait: you need the soundtrack of the week again, don’t you? Why not try this version which makes you wonder what people did with their time before there was YouTube.)

So yes, in the year 2000, I was scrapping in the land of paper dolls. I’m not sure which is scarier: the layout above with its paper dolls of Dorothy, Tinman and Scarecrow…or the fact that the layout above was published. Really. I’m not particularly proud of that. I’m just telling you so it puts things into perspective. It means I was not the only person scrapping like this.

Care for more flashbacks from the dawn of the twenty-first century? How about a tribute to my school colours?

And how about the title that everyone had to use? It was law that you go somewhere snowy, take pictures and use this title. Seriously. The scrapbooking police would arrive at your door and arrest you if you had a snowy photo in your home and no layout with this title.

At least, that was what I had heard.

Do I need to add that both of these were published? This was pretty snazzy stuff. Look how brave I was to have a sheet of vellum in my stash and just tear it! What would I have done if it had gone wrong? Where would I find another sheet of vellum? (It was easier to find a second rosetta stone then, I assure you.) And that purple page, my goodness. I cross-stitched! Cross-stitched! We are talking the height of modern and cutting edge. Also, it was pretty daring to use embarrassing photos of yourself (or any photo of yourself, it seemed), so if you didn’t catch this, you’re in for a shock:

Yes. Sixteen-year-old me with frizzy hair in cheerleading pajamas. (You know that cheerleaders have official pajamas as well as matching uniforms and matching practice clothes, right? I digress.) Printed on the pages of Paperkuts magazine.

Okay, time to be a bit more serious: my pages from the year 2000 still make me cringe, but there are a few things that I learned and there might even be a smidgen of style starting to show up. A tiny speck. Like smaller than dust, but still…let’s see.

In 2000…
I shopped mostly online from the states, though I did discover I could buy adhesive at Artbase at Lakeside shopping centre.
I scrapped on the dining room table that was never used for dining. I scrapped late at night when I should have been writing my thesis. And part of my thesis research was watching repeats of a programme that aired at 1am every night, so scrapping kept me awake until and during that strange excuse for academia. (No, really. I have seen every episode ever made.)
I kept my scrapbooking supplies in a drawer. One single drawer. Though I left quite a bit out on the table.
I still mostly used the same old 35mm point and shoot.
All my pages were 8.5×11 and double page spreads.
My favourite tools were the Jill Rinner paper doll templates and the Coluzzle system.
I bought my first scrapbooking font collection (on a CD, as nothing was just downloadable then!) and started journaling by printing from the computer. But I almost always chose handwritten style fonts, which makes me think I was mostly scrapbooking in someone else’s handwriting. Hmpf. I did handwrite quite a few of my titles, with lettering styles learned from Becky Higgins in the creative lettering column in Creating Keepsakes. And I had my biggest purchase to date—a set of Prismacolor coloured pencils. I still use them and they are still lovely, but it was about a $40 investment, which was huge for a set of coloured pencils.
I bought my first papers from Bazzill Basics—so I now had cardstock in about two dozen colours! I also found a UK stockist of acid-free cardstock, but it only came in poster-sized sheets, so I bought a bunch and spent an entire weekend cutting it down to size. That paper lasted me the majority of the year.
I bought my first sheets of vellum. I bought about three Paperkin paper dolls and found them too expensive to actually use so I would trace around them and make duplicates. Somewhere those three dolls are still in their packages.
I still matted everything. Usually several times.
But I did start to try things that were a bit dangerous for way back when: stitching, tearing, scrapping about yourself. Did you catch that there was wire holding the heart around the neck of the tinman? Crazy. Okay, it wasn’t stuff that was so dangerous I needed a lifeguard or anything, but it was more than scissors + gluestick = page. It was the ball starting to roll. If nothing else, it was the start of accumulating more stash, since clearly now papercrafters needed sewing supplies as well as their gluesticks.

And the year 2000 was when I started submitting my pages to magazines and the first time I had pages published. The first time a magazine phoned me to ask for a page, I pretty much passed out on the spot. (Well, actually I react the same way now but I have learned to finish the phone conversation!) That call was for the World of Memories book, where the pages were displayed by the scrapper’s state or country. It still makes me laugh when I see the description of the book as featuring ‘113 scrapbookers from the United States, Australia, Canada and England’. Two of the ‘scrapbookers from England’ were Jane Dean and I. I will quietly wave to the third scrapper without naming her because I don’t know if she would like me to say! Jane can slap me next weekend if she was keeping World of Memories a secret. I can take it. Anyway, one of my pages in that book?

A paperkin dressed up to look like a beefeater with pictures of the Tower of London.

I blame that layout for every little bit of what happened from then on, because I got emails for years asking where I bought my beefeater paperkin. Lots of emails asking how much I would charge to make one. And one email from a guy who offered me $50 to make one so he could wrap it up and put it under the tree because he was surprising his scrapbooking wife with a trip to Europe. (I did make that one, but I only charged him postage. I was a sucker for a sweet story!)

2001 was a very big year, so I will save that for tomorrow with a post of its own. But of course I have a need to leave you with something that is more of this lifetime! So…I tried and tried to come up with something inspiring from the pages above, and I just couldn’t bring myself to make a paperdoll. But my sewing machine can cross stitch these days, which made this layout a heck of a lot quicker than the garishly purple one above…and I didn’t have to measure a single x to stitch it!

J: don’t get mad: you are cute.

Yesterday Karen asked a big question in the comments:
my ? to you is…can anyone evolve into a better scrapper? i have been scrapping for quite some time and still, it is ok…i just love the look and style of so many other scrappers. Mine is just plain and simple. Any advice on how to evolve?

So here’s my answer: Yes, everyone can evolve. No, that does not mean you will get to a magic point and look at your layouts and know with confidence that no one has ever scrapped this wonderfully in the history of the world. It’s a tough one to answer and I am not the authority (though I am not sure that there is an authority) but over the course of this week o’ time warp, I think some answers may form. For me, the evolution started to get concrete in 2001. So come back for more embarrassment explanation and let’s see if we can put something together that makes sense.

xlovesx

PS: More modern-day stuff here today, if you fancy a star or two. And proof that I still scrap embarrassing photos of myself.

Comment [20]

Please, please, please understand how very difficult it is to lead with that image. Please don’t run away! I promise these are not an experiment in my newfound scrapping style. In fact, these are some of the very first pages I ever made.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to teach a layout class for the Scrapmates in Enfield and in thinking about what we would do for the project, I stumbled upon a class page I taught on that very same May bank holiday Monday in 2001. The supplies for that double page spread included four sheets of cardstock. Nothing else. So I had a little challenge to see if I could use a few basics from that original double page spread while making it up to date…like adding a few zillion pieces of patterned paper to the kit. But anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

All this inspired me to go through my old scrapbooks. The ones I keep on a bookshelf in the spare room. The ones that are filled with pages that make me cringe…some a little, others a lot. And see if I could track where I have been as a scrapper. So over the next four days, I will possibly scare you a great deal with some images of old pages. But hopefully there will also be some things that make more sense…a visual evolution of a scrapbooker. And a little project at the end of it all that you might like to do too. I call it time warp week. And as there will also be a great deal of explanation, you might like to listen to the time warp in the background, for added humour and enlightenment.

I discovered scrapbooking in the autumn of 1998 at that fine American shopping establishment known as Big Lots. If you’ve never seen a Big Lots well…it’s called Big Lots because they buy giant lots of random close-out items and sell them very cheaply in stores that are big but basic. Every Big Lots I’ve ever been to has been housed in what used to be a Wal-mart before Wal-mart decided they needed a bigger, better building. There was a Big Lots store in the little town where I went to college and it was a huge hit with college students, as the pay cheques from our minimum wage, part-time jobs went a bit further when you weren’t paying for pretty store displays or correctly spelled packaging. And there in a giant box of random items, I found a scrapbook kit in a box for the princely sum of $3.99.

The kit contained a cardboard 3-ring binder, ten page protectors, ten sheets of white cardstock, a dried up glue stick, some faded construction paper and a plastic shape template. And I did actually use all of the contents of this kit to make my very first scrapbook, a gift from the cast for the director of a play I was in that term. So if you haven’t figured it out, that means I can not hide my very first pages from the world. They are in someone else’s house. Sometimes this gives me nightmares. Because I remember just how terribly frightening those first ten pages were. And of course I was already taking it seriously—I had to double my investment by paying at least another $4 for a set of Crayola markers to make the beautiful titles and clever captions in that book. Imagine the beauty.

Shortly after giving that album away, I discovered that there were people who used the word ‘scrapbooking’ with a real ‘ing’ at the end, almost as if it were an athletic event. I discovered that Wal-mart had a scrapbooking aisle where they were hiding all the good pens, far away from the Crayola markers in the stationery section. Then I found the scrapbook aisle (singular in those days!) at Hobby Lobby. It was there that I bought an out of date, marked down issue of Creating Keepsakes magazine and had the biggest scare of my entire life: I WAS SCRAPBOOKING ALL WRONG.

See, those pages at the top of this post…they are actually significantly less scary than my very first pages. They were made in late ‘98 and show that I had discovered some things (like the pack of coloured cardstock that had navy, hunter green, brick red and a yellow that didn’t match anything) and not others (all the pastel and brown papers are just typing papers…not at all from the scrapbook section). So I suppose this is where it all started.

In 1998…
I shopped at Wal-mart and Hobby Lobby.
I scrapped on my lap, while sitting on my futon in my just-off-campus apartment. I usually scrapped late at night while watching a strange combination of MTV and HGTV.
I kept my scrapbooking supplies in a small plastic file box. All of them.
My camera was a point-and-shoot 35mm I had had for at least six years.
I scrapbooked on both sides of the cardstock.
My favourite tools were a plastic template with a circle, square, oval, heart and star, deckle edge scissors (though I didn’t know they were called ‘deckle’. I called them ‘ripped’.) and my very first punch: a small star.
I journalled with the four-colour starter set of Zig Fine & Chisel tip pens.
My pages didn’t stand alone or have titles—I would just do a run of pages with a roll of film and move on to different colours with the next roll of film. ‘Different colours’ meaning a little more navy on the first roll; a little more hunter on the second roll.
All of my pages were 8.5×11. Most of them were navy, hunter green or brick red.
At the very end of the year, I bought my first patterned papers in a book from Hot off the Press.

And in trying my very best to take some inspiration from those pages to come up with something today, I ended up with this:

It surprised me just how much I had to search in my stash to find navy blue cardstock when it used to be my staple. This was the only sheet I found. And I had absolutely none of that hunter green, so I had to opt for a springier shade (oh, what a shame, I hear you say!) of green. Before you think that’s the only thing I could ‘lift’ from those ten-year-old pages, I did include a tiny bit of patterned paper cut with my current favourite punch (the 2” scallop circle) as a nod to my melodramatic overuse of the star punch in 1998. But yeah, that is pretty much all I could do. I wasn’t going to crop anyone into a heart shape just for laughs.

In 1999, I like to think things got a little better. But only a little.

In 1999…
I shopped at the giant chain craft stores and Two Peas in a Bucket.
I scrapped on my dining table, which was only once used for a meal, though it was sometimes used for studying for exams.
I learned not to scrap on both sides of the cardstock, so I could move my layouts around.
I started making pages with titles—pretty much all double page spreads.
My favourite tools were punches and the Fiskars circle cutter.
I journalled with a black Zig Millennium pen, but I hadn’t realised they came in different sizes.
All of my pages were 8.5×11. The colours got a bit more varied, but only to include derivatives like burgundy and baby blue.
I had a few more patterned papers, most by Keeping Memories Alive.
I learned I could cut titles by printing out fonts on the computer and tracing them onto paper.
And let’s not forget, I started making crazily random opera singers with viking hats out of paper. That had to be a real skill. Maybe even one that would get me a job someday? Surely not.

In trying to find something from that opera page to scraplift, I had no choice but to try to paper piece something. Though I once spent hours and hours working on paper pieced figures, I really can’t imagine doing that today. It just wouldn’t hold my attention that long. But I managed to cobble together a tree…and I did my best to work with that burgundy cardstock, but in the end I had to relegate it to the very edges and brighten things up with the yellow.

So you can see where this is going…tomorrow we venture to the valley of the (paper) dolls. I know you can’t wait.

xlovesx

Comment [18]

The twenty-fifth is here! So here’s a photo to blog this month and the album prompt to download!

Now…time to get clicking the shutter.

Wishing you a fabulous Sunday! When you post your photos or pages online, comment below with a link so I can include you in our next round up of show and tell!

Scrap your Day links & schedule:
About this project
Sign up for reminders
Getting Ready
Photo Fact Sheet #01
April Album Prompt
Photo Fact Sheet #02
May Album Prompt
Our Flickr group
UKScrappers discussion thread

xlovesx

Comment [25]