Jean Railla
Modern Crafting
>> Jean Railla is the founder of getcrafty.com and the author of Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec (Broadway Books). Obsessed with the craft of cooking, she blogs about food, family, and community at mealbymeal.blogspot.com.
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S aave a confession to make: I hate scrapbooking. ure, scrapbooks seem innocent. They are, fter all, just a collection of photos, journaling, mementos, and craft materials “artistically” arranged in a bound book. Fine.
But what I don’t understand is why you need a whole industry to support it. Why do you need stores, kits, TV shows, books, and online depots? Why do you need to purchase a kit full of baby-pink marbled papers and fake wood borders to use in your scrapbook? Isn’t the whole idea of scrapbooking to use “scraps” from your life? Isn’t buying a scrapbooking kit, by its very nature, cheating? Isn’t it all just rampant consumerism?
Evidently, I must be the only woman left in America who is not taken with the craft. According to Simple Scrapbooks Magazine, scrapbooking is a $2.5 billion industry, and there are 32 million “scrappers” in the United States alone. Clearly, scrapbooking is taking over.
I was thinking about this the other day as I was playing around in iPhoto, arranging recent digital
pics into a slideshow that I’d play for friends and family. I added the “Ken Burns Effect,” which pans on each photo, chose Fade Through Black from a pull-down menu, allowing for nice transitions between segments, and selected a song from my i Tunes collection —Johnny Cash and June Carter’s “Jackson” — as my soundtrack.
The result was quite lovely and we all enjoyed it so much that I started playing with iMovie, which offered equally limited but visually appealing options for making little home movies of my family. I added a few titles, more music, some video clips, and burned the results onto a DVD.
That’s when it dawned on me: I was, in my own way, scrapbooking! What are these movies but digital scrapbooks of our lives together? Sure I chose the music and the images, but all the options that made it truly compelling were pre-chosen for me by those brilliant designers at Apple.
Was I cutting and pasting my own collections of memories into real objects that could be kept on a shelf? No, I was not, because it would take too long and I wanted to put something together that would be compelling but easy. In other words, the only difference between my most recent digital craft experiences and those of scrapbookers is purely one of aesthetics! Whereas I prefer a clean, modern style and a cool soundtrack, scrapbookers like a busier, pastiche-like look. Sure, I might not like it, but maybe I need to get over myself.
What’s most important is what our digital and paper scrapbooks have in common: we spent the time to make something meaningful to share with those we love.
And that’s what always gets me about crafting. Up or down, right or left, kitschy on purpose or without a clue, it’s impossible to be a crafter and be a self-righteous boob for too long. One day you’re making fun of tea cozies, and the next day you’re getting all teary-eyed because your best friend crocheted you one, and even though it’s ironic, you still feel the love knowing she took the time to make it for you. ×
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