paper: And then a step to the right | pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

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.

Read more about:

28 May 2008

Next post: Put your hands on your hips
Previous post: It's just a jump to the left