Scrapbooks take more effort now

hkronmueller

Back when my sisters and I were growing up, scrapbooks weren't the "in" things.

Sure, my mom kept photo albums of our vacations and birthdays, but when it came right down to it, that's all they were -- books of photos.

There weren't any handwritten, swirly-lettered descriptions of what was going on in the pictures. There weren't any goofy stickers illustrating the moments. And there certainly weren't any colorful background papers to bring out the mood the people in the pictures were feeling.

All that was in them were sticky off-white pages that clung to the pictures and the clear plastic covers.

Nowadays those albums are as old-fashioned as eight-track tapes. They've been replaced by flashy scrapbooks with cute little cutouts, colorful stickers and story-telling descriptions.

My sister, Jenn, took up scrapbooking a little over a month ago. She's making a book about my nephew Ryan's first year.

What she is finding out is that you can now only make one page in the same time you used to be able to put together an entire photo album.

You see, scrapbooks are a lot like microwaved Peeps (the little Easter marshmallow treats).

At first the Peeps seem small. Then you put them on a plate and pop them in the microwave for 35 seconds and you start to see their true size emerge. As the Peeps go round and round, they just keep getting larger and larger until finally they're the size of softballs. (No joke!)

Scrapbooks start out small too. At first you think, "Hey, I can do that in no time. It's only a little paper and a few stickers."

Good idea, bad logic.

Jenn's first trip to the craft store was a rude awakening. She discovered the paper and the stickers don't come cheap and that once you see something you like an insatiable urge comes over you to keep buying and buying.

After a recent trip to the craft store, Jenn called to tell me about her newest purchases.

"I think Mike is going to ground me from ever going there again," she said, referring to her husband.

It wouldn't be such a problem if all the pages simply had a few pictures, a few stickers and a few cutouts.

But that would be too easy.

In the world of scrapbooking, every page has to have a few pictures matted on fun paper, some cute corresponding stickers, maybe a cutout or two and, of course, journaling.

Journaling is where you write a little story about what is happening in the picture. Only you can't just write it, you have to write it with swirly or other fancy lettering.

Ryan's first birthday was Feb. 28, so Jenn is trying to make up for almost 13 months of photographs and fun. She has about 10 pages done. But because Ryan is her firstborn and she has about 1,000 pictures of him, she has a long way to go.

Nonetheless, all Jenn's talk about scrapbooking made me want to start my own.

I went to visit my boyfriend at his mom's house in New Jersey in late December and early January. Three of the days we spent in New York City.

The first day we went to ground zero, rode on the Staten Island Ferry, visited FAO Schwarz and saw the giant Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. The second day was New Year's Eve, so of course we were in Times Square to see the ball drop. The last day we went to shop in Chinatown and find all of the places in my favorite movie, "You've Got Mail."

In short, I have a lot of pictures from my exciting trip to New York City, and putting them in a regular photo album just wouldn't do them justice. Instead, I'll take the time and spend a little money to make my trip come alive on the pages of a scrapbook.

Heather Kronmueller is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.