Every other week, Cheri Kirkpatrick of Downers Grove meets with a group of friends to chat, laugh, nibble desserts and engage in an activity that is receiving a whirlwind of attention as the “quilting bee of the ’90s.” And just as a grandmother’s hand-sewn quilt can be a patchwork of memories to treasure and pass along to future generations as a family heirloom, so can the product of these gatherings: scrapbooks.
A far cry from the practice of merely placing photos in sticky so-called magnetic albums, today’s method, called family archiving or scrapbooking, is something of an art form. It can include cropping photos down to size with fancy scissors, placing them against colored or patterned papers or adding stickers, rubber-stamp images and dye-cut thematic shapes. Journaling, or captioning the photos, is also an important component. Placed within a fitting context, the photos take on a new life, telling their stories in an entertaining, aesthetically pleasing fashion.
“You can be as creative as you want, keeping it simple or going nuts,” said Kirkpatrick, an admitted scrapbooking addict, who said she regularly has to kick out her similarly hooked friends at midnight on the evenings they gather, even after scrapbooking for a solid five hours.
Within the 2 1/2 years that Kirkpatrick has embraced this hobby, she said, she has been amazed at how the industry has flourished. Local chain stores dedicated to crafts have noted the trend and are rushing to respond with specialized products that once were hard to find.
“It’s the newest, freshest thing going in the store,” said Barbara Spangler, craft manager at Frank’s Nursery and Crafts in Naperville, who added that it’s hard to keep up with all the new products like papers, rulers and hole punches that are being manufactured. “Within the past year, we’ve dedicated six 4-foot sections in one aisle, and we’re going to have to increase that area size.”
Three stores dedicated exclusively to the hobby of scrapbooking are within the west suburban area: More Than Memories in Downers Grove, Remember the Moment in Geneva and Memorybooklane in Naperville. All have opened within the last seven months.
“There’s a huge, huge market out there, especially out West,” said Connie Ryan, who opened Remember the Moment in September. “In the Phoenix area they have (scrapbooking stores) like we have McDonald’s. It seems like there’s one on every street corner. Hopefully, I’m part of the beginning of the wave here.”
Ryan discovered scrapbooking for the first time last May. She was so taken by the beauty of the scrapbooks and the allure of compiling family archives for future generations that she quit her 10-year job at a computer consulting firm and ventured full time into the business of scrapbooking.
“It just sounded like the perfect opportunity. There are no stores like it in this area, and it gives me more time to spend with my family,” said Ryan, the mother of two preschoolers. “It’s so relaxing to do something for myself that others enjoy as well.”
Memorybooklane in Naperville opened the day after Thanksgiving and already “business is incredible,” said manager Taryn Anderson. “We haven’t even done any advertising yet.”
As long-time manufacturers of ribbons in the craft industry, Margot and Mel Fraisl had observed first-hand some of the popular trends in their business. About a year and a half ago, after hearing increased talk about scrapbooking, they decided to take a closer look.
“If you keep getting hit with pebbles long enough, you say, `Hey, something’s happening here,”‘ said Margot.
In May, they abandoned manufacturing to open More Than Memories. Before they had opened or even begun advertising, customers were stopping by, Margot recalled. Word had leaked out via the Internet about the store.
“You want to talk about jungle drums beating. Word travels faster on the Net than any other way,” she said. In fact, Mel estimated that 80 percent of their first customers heard about the store on the Internet. Margot said that occasionally they’ll learn about a new product on the Internet even before the manufacturer has contacted them.
“We like to monitor (Internet sites and chat rooms) to see what our customers are looking for,” Mel said. “It’s interesting to see people talking back and forth and tearing products apart.”
Margot theorized that the burgeoning popularity of scrapbooking may indicate people are seeking a comforting soft-touch alternative to their high-tech lives.
“For a person spending all day in front of a computer, a creative outlet becomes that much more important,” she said.
The hobby has caught on to such a degree that scrapbooking classes have expanded to daylong seminars and even scrapbooking cruises. (One such cruise, offered by the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line in March 1999, is dubbed “Croppin’ Round the Caribbean,” a weeklong vacation featuring “workshops, demos, contests, croppin’ boutiques and the sun.”) There are also scrapbooking magazines, most notably Keepsakes, published in Orem, Utah, and Memory Makers, published in Denver.
Clearly, scrapbooking is a hobby coming into its own. But ask anyone associated with a business called Creative Memories and you will learn that scrapbooking is nothing new at all. They have been bringing scrapbooking into people’s homes for 10 years, something like Tupperware ladies who demonstrate cropping photos instead of burping bowls.
“We are very aware that we’ve driven an industry that’s really out there now,” said Susan Iida Pederson, spokeswoman for Creative Memories, based in St. Cloud, Minn. “But from our point of view, we have not seen a disproportionate increase in sales or consultants. Our growth has been pretty steady over the past 10 years.”
Indeed, Creative Memories, which was co-founded by two women in Minnesota with a vision to “help people create scrapbook albums to preserve their photos, stories and memorabilia” (as stated in company literature), has grown from six field consultants to more than 36,000 in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico with approximately 1,000 in Illinois.
One of the central thrusts of Creative Memories–and one that is echoed by all other scrapbooking businesses–is the use of materials that are chemically compatible with photographs so they will last for generations. The terms “acid-free,” “lignin-free” (lignin is a pulp in wood that can cause paper to become brittle and yellow), “photo friendly” and “archivally correct” are the buzzwords of the industry.
When Danita Bergrud of Glen Ellyn, a Creative Memories consultant, leads a class in someone’s home, she makes sure to impress upon people the dangers of some albums, including magnetic versions that can yellow pictures or fuse to them, making them impossible to remove. Pictures are our treasures, she stresses, and need to be treated as such.
“Think about it” she said. “If there was a flood or a fire, what would you run back into your house to get? Your photo albums. Forget jewelry. That can be replaced. Photographs are your memories. They’re you. They’re proof that you were on this earth.”
Margot Fraisl said she always opens her scrapbooking classes with three simple questions: “Why did you take your pictures? Where are they now? And what are you going to do about it?”
The biggest reason people take pictures, she said, is to remember a moment. The second is to share those memories with others (i.e., out-of-town friends and relatives). “But you’re not doing either of those things if they’re in shoeboxes, drawers and closets,” Margot said, pointedly.
Although many people predictably gaze at decorated scrapbooks and lament “I could never do that,” Margot insisted that there is no right or wrong way: “This is a leisure time activity. It’s not a craft that means you need to have a skill. The important thing to do is get the photos into a scrapbook and tell your story. They become photo journals of your life, and there is probably no activity more rewarding than that.”
And for people who protest that they have no time to engage in scrapbooking?
“Nobody has time,” she countered. “But you can do this in front of the TV, and kids love to be involved. Make it a family activity.”
Even if there is time for nothing else, Margot recommended that people jot down names, dates and events on the backs of photos as soon as they are developed “because at some point, your children are going to look at these pictures and say, `Who’s this? Why is this important?’ And you might not be around to tell them.”
Although most scrapbooking aficionados convene in groups of fewer than 10 people, Danita Bergrud recently organized a modern-day offspring of the quilting bee, an all-day scrapbooking workshop and luncheon called Crop Till You Drop, at the Glen Ellyn Holiday Inn. She said 136 women and one man attended the seminar, cropping, cutting, gluing and journaling for nine straight hours.
Larry Winters of Lisle, the lone male, (who was cheerfully undisturbed by his status, even as Bergrud addressed the crowd over the microphone as “Ladies–and Larry”) was in the process of creating a heritage album for his parents, organizing and cropping a stack of black and white photos, many of which were taken “way before I was even thought of,” he said.
With him was his wife, Kathy, who has been hooked on scrapbooking for more than three years. “I enjoy flashing back, reliving life and journaling, with tender thoughts to leave behind for our children,” Kathy said. “It’s a legacy we’re leaving behind.”
Perhaps most refreshing of all is that this fast-growing hobby requires a minimum of skill and training. If you can cut and paste–and emote–you will succeed.
“It doesn’t have to be a work of art,” said Bergrud, “because it’s a work of the heart.”
Internet websites devoted to scrapbooking include www.dmarie.com; www.rockower.com/bbs/; and www.scrapbooking.com.
