The art of remember when (ing)
My first blog came about to document my son’s young life and along with that came the hobby of scrapbooking. My mom was a scrapbooker in the old sense of the word.
She had a ton of pictures that she would lovingly put in those old school magnetic sticky albums that ruined the photos over time.
She would often write on the back of the photos in black ink or pencil; committing the place, date or main subjects to eternal memory. Sometimes she would forget, or leave it for another memory keeping session and that information would be gone forever.
I like the term memory keeping for what my mom did, saving baby teeth, hair from our first haircuts, which she did herself. I started out following her lead saving my child’s hair, baby shoes, a onesie, but I got stuck on the how to preserve them in a cute way.
I have been doing my version of scrapbooking since the Two Peas in a Bucket days. The Creating Keepsakes magazine ( under the helm of Lisa Bearnson ) days. That is when scrapbookers became serious.
There were conventions and competitions, some that turned into public scandal? Oh my goodness!
I know conventions, retreats, etc. still exist today. I attended CKU way back when; a bit “clicky” but loads of fun
and even late night scrapbook supply shopping. I have fond memories of the Two Peas in a Bucket message boards before we all lost our minds, there was so much to learn from each other.
I had and still have a tendency to get caught up in all the “stuff,” all of the supplies were and still are overwhelming, but so much darn fun to shop for.
I just loved going to the scrapbook store, wandering up and down the paper isle, then on to the stickers, stamps, brads and on and on it went.
I became a scrapbook collector not a doer.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a scrapbook/ crafting room filled with ink pads in a rainbow of colors, paints and brushes, paper and glitter and stamps? Oh my! I am sure that it’s mere existence would help me create more wonderful pages. Not! I would look at the work done by other scrapbookers and swoon, but just could not seem to consistently produce much of my own work.
It was and is something I find utterly frustrating.
It didn’t help that when I started scrapbooking my son was already around 9 years old and I didn’t know where to start. He didn’t come into the world at the age of nine, so I had pregnancy to 9 years worth of photos to deal with and that was just for him.
I still haven’t started documenting my now 61 years on the planet. My thought process was that everything had to be chronological.
Plenty of time was wasted trying to get all of the infant pictures together, followed by toddler stage gathering it all in one place to do what?
So on and on it goes. Still trying to figure it out and get a system that will work.