Now picture this: Scrapbook craze sticking like glue
Whenever members of the Pacarro family celebrate a milestone birthday or spend a day at the beach, they count on Mom — Annette Pacarro — to transform the occasions into scrapbook pages filled with photos, journal entries and memorabilia.
An Easter scrapbook entry is a cheerful reminder of the children's egg hunt three years ago.
Pacarro captured the day's festivities in a two-page layout fashioned out of green and pink paper and embellished with cutouts of baby chicks hopping out of their newly hatched eggs.
"The whole meaning behind scrapbooking is really deep," Pacarro says. "It's basically about preserving family memories."
Pacarro of Honolulu is among a growing number of scrapbook makers creating customized album pages to document special moments in their families' lives.
The Craft & Hobby Association reports sales of scrapbook materials and supplies nationwide more than doubled from $1 billion in 2001 to more than $2.5 billion in 2003. A quarter of all households participate in the hobby, according to a survey from Creating Keepsakes magazine.
Cheryl Simmons of Dover Township, N.J., says she spends up to $40 a month and dozens of hours putting together scrapbooks.
She takes pictures of everything from weddings to a pretty fall day. She glues them on a page, which she embellishes with a sticker or other designs. She protects the page in plastic, puts it in a scrapbook and goes on to the next one.
"You tell the story of what happened that day or at an event," Simmons says. "I'm hoping my scrapbooks will be here 100 years and will be passed down like my fine china."
Store owners are keenly aware of their customers' dedication.
"People are more willing to take art techniques and put them in a scrapbook," says Adele Falda, part owner of a scrapbook store and studio in Chandler, Ariz.
Scrapbooks today range from 8-by-8-inch family photo albums with basic journal entries — names, dates and locations — to 12-by-12-inch masterpieces archiving significant events, including weddings and anniversaries, in photos, stories and elaborate embellishments.
At Falda's Creations! studio, scrapbook creators have hundreds of tools at their fingertips and a quiet place to work for an hourly or daily fee.
"You bring basics like paper, stickers, photos and pens, and then you can create your pages or personalized cards and add more by using our tools," Falda says.
The studio offers a variety of hand punches, paddle punches, corner punches and border punches and punches that create three-dimensional images. A scissors wall holds 94 different scissors that cut a variety of wavy, curvy, zigzagging and crooked edges for borders or photos.
Pacarro often makes scrapbooks with her children, who work on their own albums. She also takes part in scrapbook nights with friends.
The activity is a great way for family and friends to get to know each other because they can share stories about events they're including, Pacarro says. She is a consultant with Creative Memories, a direct-sales scrapbooking company based in St. Cloud, Minn.
Today's scrapbooking has ties to the colors, styles and attitudes in current home decor and clothing fashion. The latest trends include metallic colors, fabrics, square pages and the desire to decorate pages to hang as artwork in frames sized for a scrapbook page.
Jill Gaskill of Mullica Hill, N.J., also a consultant for Creative Memories, suggests first-timers have three simple things: a tool to cut photographs, something to adhere photographs to a page and a nice album.
Her most important tip: Always use photo-safe products.
• www.addictedtoscrapbooking.com: Addicted to Scrapbooking store.
• www.creatingkeepsakes.com: Creating Keepsakes scrapbook magazine.
• www.creativememories.com: Creative Memories products.
• www.lascrapper.com: Leaving Prints products.
• www.scrapbooking.com: Scrapbooking.com magazine.
• www.scrapjazz.com: ScrapJazz scrapbooking site.
Scrapbooking tips
While you decide how you want your scrapbook to look, those in the business can help you preserve your memories and get better organized with this advice:
• Use acid- and lignin-free papers, glues, pens and paints to give scrapbooks a life span of more than 200 years.
• Sort photos into categories, such as years, special events, individual children, holidays, vacations and birthdays.
• Establish a focal point and crop around it — cutting away unnecessary background. Make one photo the main focal point of your page.
• Select a color scheme using two to three colors from the focal photo used in the layout.
• Mount the cropped photo on paper, trimming close to the cropped edges of the photo. Use combinations of straight and patterned scissors to crop the photo and the mat.
• For easy edging, use straight scissors to cut out the photo or mat, and then edge with patterned scissors.
• Finish each page with special touches, such as rubber stamps, stickers or scrapbooking accessories available in a wide variety of patterns, colors and themes.
Source: Hobby Industry Association