Above is a scrapbook layout I made several years ago, 2005 I believe it was, of our day at the Houston International Festival. It was one of the last handful of layouts I made before I took a long break from scrapbooking and concentrated on using my papercrafting tools and supplies to make cards and artist trading cards instead.
My scrapbooking style was never really artistic or trendy. I just used it as a way to make glorified photo albums of occasions, events, outings, friends, family, pets, and other random parts of our lives that I wanted to document. Pages of photos with pretty papers and other embellishments to help capture memories.
From the beginning, I knew I was a textbook example of a non-traditional scrapper. Not having kids (by choice) is the biggest and most obvious reason why, but only one of many. I really enjoyed going to scrapbook crops, and for the most part it wasn't really a problem being different, because we all had plenty in common for idle chit-chat while we were working. But, as the scrapbook hobby trend started to fade, and the crops were held less frequently and with fewer participants, an element of exclusionary cliqueishness and junior high mean girl pettiness began to emerge among some of the women.
A couple ugly experiences with those kinds of women put me off of going to scrapbooking crops, and after that I gradually stopped working on layouts at home too. And then I didn't even take and print out photos like I used to. There is a span of about five years where I only have a few sets of photos from things we did. I lost a lot of photos in a computer crash, but that doesn't account for all of those years,
But, last year, a childhood friend of mine spent a few days visiting Houston, and one of the things we did was flip through my scrapbooks, because I had some layouts with photos of people she remembered from back when as well. That got me thinking about it again, and within the past couple of weeks, I've started going through my supplies, and CDs of photos, and preparing to start up with it again.
My town is hosting a couple of all-day scrapbook crops this Summer at a community center, and I think I want to go to at least one of them and see what it's about. Also, I found out about a town not too-too far from me that has a scrapbook strore that is supposed to have a really friendly group of women who come to the crops.
This weekend, I bought a few supplies, and ordered some photo prints to work with. Maybe I'll get back into it. Even if I don't enjoy the crops anymore, I have my sewing and craft room to work in now.
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