“Somebody, please, give me an idea!” cried out Jenny Johnson, 34, looking for help in designing a page that commemorated her 4-year-old daughter’s visit to a beauty shop. Across the folding table, three women lifted their eyes from their own projects. “Bubbles,” offered one of the scrapbookers, “cut out cute little bubbles.” With an approving nod, Johnson set to work on pink bubble cutouts that framed pictures of little Cassady having her hair done. “She got her hair washed in the big bowl,” her mother explained. “It was a very big deal for her.”
Scrapbooking has become a big business. Creating Keepsakes, the leading scrapbook trade magazine, estimates that 4 million people, almost all of them women, gather for “crop-alongs” or “power layouts” every month. One company alone, Creative Memories, has 65,000 “consultants” who visit these gatherings offering expertise and, of course, plenty of equipment to sell, like treated paper and adhesives that preserve forever that special trip to the Wisconsin Dells. Creative Memories estimates sales of $300 million this year. One avid scrapbooker says she has spent more than $10,000 on the hobby in two and a half years, a sum she was not eager to share with her husband. Meanwhile, there are now about 2,000 scrapbook stores across the nation, up from 300 five years ago. And that doesn’t count the burgeoning scrapbook aisles at Wal-Mart–or the hours of television programming. Last month one cable network held an eight-hour scrapbooking marathon, which included a one-hour special called “Croppin’ USA.”
These are not your grandmother’s humble albums. These are extravagant creations: titled pages, journal entries, love letters, artwork, color-coordinated doodads. And they are meant to be exhaustive records of family life. Ashwini Karnik, 26, has a picture of her son eating, under the headline arnav having his first mango. The scrapbook of Paula Fabbri-Morrow, 38, includes DNA from her 2-year-old daughter, Julia, taken from amniocentesis.
Jenny Johnson claims to have recorded “everything” in the life of her daughter through the age of 2, starting with the ultrasound. “I mean everything,” she says. “Tell me what you want to know.” There is Cassady’s first bath in a tub, her first trip to the park. “I’m on the lookout for photo ops every day,” she says. Scrapbooking is a hobby that suits the nesting instincts of baby boomers and even Gen-Xers, drawn to the simple pleasures of home life. Besides all that, Johnson acknowledges another appeal. “To be very honest,” she says, “it’s nice to be out and doing something without my children under my feet.”
Scrapbookers typically meet in somebody’s home, but there are scrapbooking cruises to the Caribbean and Alaska, weekend sessions at resort hotels. Often the meetings have a theme, such as pajama-party sessions or Hawaiian-wardrobe nights. Depending on the group, there might be a little wine. At Laura Brown’s home the fare was more wholesome: finger bowls filled with pretzels and M&M’s.
Some say they took up scrapbooking because they felt guilty about having so many boxes of photographs gathering dust in the attic. Others say they’re a bit miffed that so few pictures were taken of them as cute little tykes–and they want to make things better for their own children. Cassandra Vickas, 36, is already teaching her 5-year-old, Veronica, to cut and paste: “She got a scrapbook for her birthday.”
Sitting elbow to elbow, sometimes into the wee hours, the scrapbookers cannot help but compare their talents. And that can cause a little anxiety. “I’m really competitive,” says Mary Young, 37, “and I’ve got a lot of friends who say, ‘I did 10 pages last night, how about you?’ " She’ll sheepishly confess that she did only one page. But she is not about to give up. And that might give pause to her husband, Jeff.
She might consider having a second child, she has told him. But not until she’s caught up on her scrapbook.
