What is Scrapbooking
Scrapbooking is a crafting and documenting activity that involves taking books with blank pages and adding photos, memorabilia, journaling, and embellishments.
Also known as cropping, the primary purpose of scrapbooking is to preserve memories for future generations, but a secondary purpose often is to exercise your creativity as you display your memories in a scrapbook.
The History of Scrapbooking
Scrapbooking as a hobby has been around since the 15th and 16th centuries. In its early stages, scrapbooking was simply a collection contained in a book. These collections could include recipes, greeting cards, snippets of paper memorabilia, tickets, or playbills. In the 1980s, scrapbooking as we know it today started as an off-shoot of people’s desire to preserve their family and religious history.
As the idea spread, it reached a mass audience of home photographers who wished to record and preserve their families’ memories for the future.
Marielen W. Christensen of Elk Ridge, Utah is the woman credited with modernizing scrapbooking. She is the author of Keeping Memories Alive and opened a scrapbook store in Spanish Fork, Utah in 1981.
The hobby became especially popular from 2001 to 2005, and it was a $2.5 billion industry with over 1,600 companies creating scrapbooking products by 2003. The rise of bloggers has likely helped it grow in popularity, and digital scrapbooking is also popular, allowing people to both share online and print hard copies.
Scrapbooking Today
Scrapbooking is popular because it lets people document their families’ lives and socialize with others while crafting. There are even gift books to do so with some paper, some photo sleeves and other adornments/embellishments.
More than 4 million women in the United States are said to be scrapbookers. Other crafts and hobbies have worked their way under the scrapbooking umbrella, such as using decorative planners and adult coloring. There has also been a rise in trade shows dedicated to scrapbooking such as the Stamp and Scrapbook EXPO and Craft and Hobby Association (CHA).
Get Started With Scrapbooking
Basic supplies for scrapbooking include a scrapbook (sizes vary but the traditional ones are 12 inches by 12 inches square) (30.48cm x 30.48cm). Scissors, decorative papers, glues, stickers, and other embellishments can also be used to create one-of-a-kind scrapbook pages along with special pens and markers to add handwritten notes. Most craft stores have a space dedicated to scrapbooking supplies.
People have been doing scrapbooking for many years. An outsider may not see the reason why people spend time scrapbooking. If you are one of them, then you will understand why. Did you know that scrapbooking has many health benefits? If you never knew or you want to know more, then this article was written with you in mind. So without further ado, here are the health benefits of scrapbooking:
Lowers stress levels
Whenever you are stressed or anxious, consider scrapbooking as it will help you calm down. Just take a deep breath and engage in this creative process and the stress or anxiety will start disappearing. In fact, it has been proven that engaging in a creative hobby can help reduce anxiety.
It is a form of meditation
When creating a scrapbook page, your mind will be forced to focus on the task at hand. You will be thinking of how to fit photos onto one layout, the color of the ink that would suit a certain stamp, how wide the strip of paper should be cut and so on. Therefore, your mind will be distracted hence giving you the much-needed reprieve from worries of life and everyday demands.
Scrapbooking gives your brain a workout
Trying to remember details such as how old you were during a certain trip or the name of the person you are seeing in a particular picture can be hard for your brain. Taking part in an activity that makes your brain work out will help keep your mind sharp.
It is a perfect social mechanism
You can choose to either do scrapbooking alone or with other people. If you need solitude, just lock yourself in a craft room for a few hours and do scrapbooking. You will come out ofthat room refreshed and ready to rejoin the ranks of society.
If you need some human interaction, gather up your family members or friends and do scrapbooking together. Scrapbooking suits introverted and extroverted people.
Scrapbooking can keep your heart happy
This is one of the major reasons why you should consider scrapbooking. Scrapbooking is not just about paper, ink, and photos. It is something that gives you a source of pride and joy as you do it by yourself. Scrapbooking also brings friends and families closer together and makes a person feel a sense of belonging and make the heart happy.
As you can see, there are many reasons why you should consider scrapbooking. So, it may be a good idea to start scrapbooking today regardless of whether you will be doing it alone or with other people and enjoy the health benefits given in this article.
Here at Starfish Designs we want to help you find your inner creative side in an environment where you can enjoy making memories last and have fun doing it. Paging through a scrapbook that you have made yourself is incredibly rewarding – it makes the memories fun and interesting to look back on and you can feel a sense of pride in your piece of of “art”! It’s a great activity to do with your children, creating wonderful bonding and sharing moments together.
Before I even knew about scrapbooking as a term I used to collect ‘memorabilia’ to stick into my homework book at school and later gather my photos and stick them in a book with the bits and pieces I had gathered like the easter egg wrapping or the ticket stub from the movies! I loved gathering my memories this way as it told a story, where a normal photo album didn’t tell a story it was just a gathering of photos. Looking back at some of my early albums its amazing to think that I was ‘scrapbooking’ before I even knew such a term!