Wednesday, February 28, 2007

postheadericon Part 2 - Acid Free at last

In 1994, in the dreary month of February, I gave in to knee surgery for my arthritis. Since it was out-patient surgery, I assumed that I would go right back to school after a weekend's recovery. HA! The Dr. said it would be more like 6 weeks. No one prepared me for post-op depression, in February, in the North, in a corner of a sofa day after day. I had no interest even in my computer community of PAL...Print Artist Lovers. We used the Print Artist program for crafting. No...not for scrapbooking. Not yet.

Leafing through the ad section of one Sunday newspaper I came across a Michaels Ad
with a little area titled, "Scrapbooking Supplies". I perked up for the first time in a couple of weeks. "I want to go there!" I said.

A dear friend on one side, my daughter on the other and a shopping cart in front I managed to drop $150 on that first visit. I learned what "drop-in" page protectors were. I learned the term "Acid-Free". We watched the demonstration, a nice little teen scrapping her prom photos. My daughter whispered that she thought I could do a lot better. I was game to try. I started by removing all those photos from the "sticky albums".

While making those first few pages I also looked online to see what there was on scrapbooking. I found an email list. It had about 50 members from all over the world. The US members were one by one, crowing about their local scrapbook stores. I waited and waited for one in my area.

Then one opened only 11 minutes from my house. Are you surprised that I know exactly how long it took to get there? Their tiny store had to put card tables all in the aisles when they held a crop.

I couldn't wait to share the news with the email list. All of sudden there were a lot of private emails from other members in Michigan wanting to know where this store was. We needed our own list to plan on meeting somewhere. Another member, younger and more techie, started a new list and we called ourselves
MIscrappers.

The store offered to host a get together. We called it a Mini-Meet, like the old PALS group used to have. That first Meet was a huge success for the group and the store. There were many meets to come and the store moved into larger quarters.

postheadericon Part 1 - My Scrapping History

Way back in 1956, when a freshman in college I liked to hand-draw my own greeting cards, especially for dates. Soon some of my dorm-buddies wanted custom cards, too, so I went into business.

From that I progressed to making scrapbook pages after each big event. We always had lots of little gifts from the dances, and formal photos from any of the Greek events. I was using a scrapbook with manila paper pages. I used rubber cement and water colors for decoration. I prized those books, mostly as a record of dating, and sorority events. I remember friends coming into my dorm room the day after an event to see what I had made.

Alas, all of the books, souvenirs and pages were lost right after we moved to our first house in 1966 and the basement flooded. I just hadn't unpacked everything yet. The negatives to snapshots were all lost, too, so there is no photo record of my college years at all.

About Me

Forty Years of Scrapping

Long before it was popular, I was trying to decorate arrangements of photos and sentimental items. Here I want to share some of my personal history and more important, some ideas I have gleaned from more than 40 years of scrapping.

lauraloub

lauraloub
A granny with a camera and a computer

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