What’s Your Scrapbooking Mission Statement?

Do you have a scrapbooking ‘mission statement’? What do you scrapbook about?

For some people, scrapbooking is more than just a way of organizing memorabilia - it’s a way of telling a story.

You can make a scrapbook album to chart the course of family members, a project or a place over an extended period. Seeing the changes that time brings helps to cement memories that might otherwise fade over the years.

Some people like to make scrapbooks to celebrate a particular event: it might be a trip or holiday of a lifetime, a graduation or - particularly appropriate at this time of year - a gathering of the clan at Christmas.

And there are many more options for making scrapbooks that go beyond the smile-filled snapshots, baby’s first steps or the African safari adventure holiday. There are scrapbookers who find ways to capture life’s more unusual or dramatic moments in their albums: moving house, remodeling a kitchen, even a trip to the hospital.

What is it about scrapbooks that makes them so versatile and powerful in recreating significant moments in our lives? Perhaps the very act of their creation is a key element in capturing the spirit of an occasion. Selecting photographs, newspaper clippings, notes, ticket stubs and other mementos places us back in the mental and emotional frame of mind we once experienced.

Choosing page backgrounds and layouts lends a style and personality to a collection of souvenirs and to recreate the context of an event or episode.

Scrapbooking can be an absorbing, labor-intensive craft - but it’s astonishing how time and detailed work can pass unnoticed when the right side of the brain takes control.

Sometimes, it’s activities like these that capture the memories and make them last.