Q&A
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
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