Great American Scrapbook

Great American Scrapbook

We leave clues. Some are inadvertent. Some are intentional. Some revelatory. Others are insignificant

For at least 100 years, Americans have glued, taped, pasted and sewn many of those clues into scrapbooks. What they reveal — and conceal — about their owners is a story Falls Village designer Jessica Helfand tells in " Scrapbooks: An American History" (Yale University Press, $45).

"It occurred to me then that reading biographies never gives you the incredible, vivid rush that you get when holding actual letters in your hand — the postmarks, the pictures, the handwriting, the photos, the errors, the scribbles," Helfand, 48, says. "It's all so deliriously human."

Scrapbooks, Helfand writes, served as an emotional ordering of the trivial and the profound. Combining the impulse to collect, to self-narrate and to affirm, scrapbooks are both the residue of an individual and the artifacts of a civilization.

Scrapbooks, whose heyday Helfand defines as from 1900 to 1935, form a kind of visual folktale — reminding us that the trivial isn't always useless and that the common is invariably uncommon.

Despite their long popularity, "Scrapbooks" is the first book to focus close attention on the history of American scrapbooks — their origins, their makers, their diverse forms, the reasons for their popularity and their place in American cultural life. The intoxicating book, which includes more than 450 full color images, examines the scrapbooks of the ordinary and extraordinary, the celebrated and notorious and finds in them stirring human connections.

"Throughout this book, it's people grabbing what is there on their kitchen table and making sense of it," Helfand, who is a partner at Winterhouse design firm, and a senior critic at Yale University School of Art. "They grabbed gum wrappers and wrote about what was going on in their lives."

Helfand's interest in scrapbooking is a grand philosophical leap from her Yale days when the "neutral international language" was the lingua franca of the cognoscenti. In contrast, the scrapbooks that excited Helfand were those whose slapdash ordinariness was beautiful — the piece of peanut affixed to one page or the shard of a shovel to another. "It's an instant mnemonic device," says Helfand. "There is a fear that life moves very quickly. And you steel yourself against time moving quickly."

That, Helfand says, is likely why scrapbooks become particularly popular after traumatic cultural events, such as the Civil War, after which the scrapbook was largely created, or World Wars I and II. Helfand dates the more recent increase in scrapbooking to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"You could recognize in another person's scrapbook something you saw in your own life," says Helfand, who has looked at hundreds of scrapbooks compiled during the last 200 years. "These are universal things we all go through. You can't not look at a woman describing the birth of her first child and not see some aspect of humanity. By looking at other people's lives, I learned a lot about my own. It's humbling."

That humility would be welcome news to the hundreds of modern scrapbookers who blitzed Helfand with hundreds of e-mails three years ago when she wrote a scathing indictment of what she considered the sterility and uniformity of modern scrapbooks. After that blog entry was posted, Helfand said, "I was vilified by the scrapbookers. And the part of me that's a mother, a sister and a daughter felt really bad."

Also intrigued. Helfand wanted to get a closer look at how — and why — people kept these visual records, and how they changed over time.

"It's the decorative ornamental object that I really have an interest in," says Helfand, one of the country's leading designers, who has worked with The New Yorker magazine, filmmaker Errol Morris, Yale University, and American Masters/PBS, among others.

The scrapbook is perhaps the most mongrelized form of autobiography. It is part photo album, part diary, part cultural library, part romantic novel. Helfand's history contains color photographs from more than 200 scrapbooks; some made by private individuals and others by the famous, including: Zelda Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Anne Sexton, Hilda Doolittle and Carl Van Vechten.

Helfand found most of the scrapbooks through the on-line auction site eBay. She then devised a list of five criteria the scrapbooks had to meet (See box). And she continued, in detective-cum-historian fashion, by researching census and ancestral records to find out to whom these scrapbooks belonged. "It's forensics. It's sociology. It's art history. It's genealogy. You try to figure out: Is it real or disingenuous?"

Who, in other words, were these people?

There was Charlotte Christine Dobbs, of Marietta, Ga., who annotated a scrapbook full of material from her wedding gown and traveling suit, from her 1916 wedding. Or Teresa Viele's scrupulous recording of her scandalous divorce, which including accusations of adultery, insanity and cruelty. Or Jessie Southard Parker, a 16-year-old living in Belmont, Mass., just before World War I. The 1912 scrapbook contains ephemera from receipts, poems, family crests, ink drawings, calling cards, deed and Bible records — but not a single mention of the sinking of the Titanic, which happened in April of that year.

Yet another 16-year-old girl was obsessed with the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. She pasted a newspaper photograph of the baby's shoes on the opposite page, in which she outlines the family tree and imagines herself in the Lindbergh's plight.

What is striking, of course, is the negative space of scrapbooks; what's omitted is nearly as significant as what's included. So, for instance, the scrapbook of Frederick G. Nixon-Nirdlinger, a theater manager from Philadelphia, who recorded his 1909 grand tour from western Europe to Egypt and Greece in a lavish scrapbook. The stunningly appointed scrapbook includes ticket stubs, Moorish lace, receipts of the purchase of a helmet in Gibraltar, graphically scintillating menus from Continental motels — and virtually no mention of his wife of 18 years, who accompanied him on the tour.

That reason for the omission becomes clear in Helfand's narrative, which explains that Nixon-Nirdlinger divorced his wife soon after the trip, took up with the fetching Charlotte Nash, 20 years his junior, moved to Paris and sired two children by her before his beautiful wife fatally shot him in the neck in their home on the French Riviera.

(Nash was acquitted by a jury of seven bachelors, but the real surprise was that Nixon-Nirdlinger had written her out of the will. All the money went to his two children.)

"All of this happens and yet his scrapbook reveals none of the emotional turbulence that must have preceded his imminent divorce," Helfand says incredulously.

But that, of course, is part of the self-narrative dimension of scrapbooks. Just as it is unclear whether they are public or private, it is equally obscure whether they are intended for full disclosure or simply to record celebratory moments. Sociologists talk about "willful episodic time" as the human tendency to skip from social celebration to social celebration when recording their lives.

And yet scrapbooks reveal that discomfiting moments are also recorded. One Southern teenager records an act of fellatio she observed on a street corner in 1922 — this in a scrapbook that otherwise recorded school dances, invitations and dance cards.

It's that dissonance and the continual juxtapositions of scrapbooks that intrigue Helfand. "Why Rudolph Valentino next to a prayer card?" she asks rhetorically. "You have to read these things like a road map."

Still, Helfand can't bring herself to warm to the "Michael's Crafts" store-bought embellishments of today's scrapbooks, which she describes as "at once playfully juvenile and strategically shrewd, steeped in memory yet inextricably bound to materiality, and seemingly devoid of any critical editorial conceit." She continues:

"Scrapbooks today tend to be overstuffed and all-inclusive — precisely the antithesis of what we have come to think of as modern. Just as the vernacular of the 21st century embraces the everyday with blind exuberance, so too does it unwittingly reinforce the value of just about everything. And yet, in a culture that celebrates the everyman (think Reality TV) and glorifies the banal (think blogs), the scrapbook takes on renewed value: everyone's opinion matters, and everyone's every waking move is important."

Nevertheless, Helfand has begun her own "scratch book," of quips, sketches and the bon mots of her two young children.

"I find it is the best therapy," Helfand said.

Republican-American news services contributed to this report.
Source: BY TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

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Scrapbooking. 3 Secrets to Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking. 3 Secrets to Scrapbooking

There are 3 secrets to Scrapbooking: organizing your photos, planning your layouts, and claiming a workspace. If these 3 steps go smoothly, you will be able to spend more time making your scrapbooks, and less time trying to track things down.

Simple Steps to Making a Scrapbook from Existing Pictures:

Decide on your theme
Choose photos
Plan your layout
Plan and write your journaling on scrap paper
Plan your cropping to fit the theme and focus on the photo subject
Lay everything out on your page
Crop and mount
Journal
Embellish
Done!

Simple Steps for Planning a Scrapbook For Upcoming Events:

Consider the theme.
Plan your layout.
Get an idea of the types of embellishments you would like to use, and start keeping an eye out for them.
Plan the photos you would like to take and make notes
Take your photos and write something down in short form about the moments you captured for journaling later.
Exchange addresses with other people who may be attending the event so you can get copies of their photos if yours don't turn out.
Get your photos developed

Claim Your Scrapbooking Space

Once you have all of your tools and supplies to begin scrapbooking there is one more thing you have to consider before getting started, space. You need to have a table or area upon which to set up your scrapbooking stuff safely and where you will feel comfortable leaving your materials out without the risk of anything getting disturbed. You also want to be able to sit comfortably in this space for the amount of time you will be working there if you are really in the scrapbooking groove.

I feel if you have to keep setting up and taking down your materials because the space is being used for something else it will interrupt your creative flow when assembling pages. When you have played around with the layout and arranged your photos in an order that satisfies you, having to take it all apart and set it up again the next time might ruin the effect you were trying to create or worse, you might forget what you did and not be able to recreate it exactly the same the next time.

If you are unable to keep a space solely for your scrapbooking purposes, keep track of your progress in a notebook. Roughly sketching out the layout and which pictures go where in the layout is a good idea so you won't break your creative flow or lose the progress you have made.

It also helps if you have the support of your family members. Their support and consideration for what you are doing and the space you are working in will keep your scrapbooking table or area intact. Talk to them and make sure everyone will respect your space, explaining to them how important scrapbooking is to you. Explain that it is essential this area won't be disturbed because it may interrupt your creative flow.

You may also want to include your family in your scrapbooking process, especially if you are working on the family or individual children's albums. They might have some unique insights or ideas that will work perfectly with what you are working on that you might not have seen or thought of. Sometimes if you are too close to something you can't always see what is right in front of you. A fresh eye may give you a new perspective on what you could be doing with your page layouts and embellishing. You should use all the tools available to you including the Internet, fellow scrapbookers' insights and any different tools they can share with you.
Source: http://www.mycraftbook.com/The_Secret_To_Scrapbooking.asp

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Digital Scrapbook In Photoshop How-To-Video

Digital Scrapbook In Photoshop How-To-Video
How-to for digital fusion scrapbook in Photoshop

This is a 6.17 minutes 'Behind the scenes' video from www.digiscrap101.com


www.digiscrap101.com

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Digital Scrapbooking Holiday Photo Card

Digital Scrapbooking Holiday Photo Card

Learn how to create a digitally scrapbooked holiday photo card using ScrapSimple templates



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Scrapbook Papers. Free Printable Scrapbook Papers

Scrapbook Papers. Free Printable Scrapbook Papers

Heaven Graphics
Heaven Graphics offers a small, but nice selection of free printable scrapbook papers to download for personal use. Use one scrapbook paper for that perfect page background, or download a bunch and crop them into your page layouts! Also excellent for digital scrapbooking, small gift wrap, handmade card designs and photo mats!

ScrapbookScrapbook
ScrapbookScrapbook offer a huge selection of printable pages, however the site is very busy amking hard sometimes to find the right page for your project, but it's well worth the look.

Bizous
Bizous is another great site that features printable pages and a suggested layout for that particular page. Especially handy if you can't quite figure how to create put your project together.

Creative Park
Creative Park has hundreds of nice printable scrapbook pages. Every imaginable theme at your fingetips.

Scrapbook Flair
Scrapbook Flair is continually add free layouts and downloads every month. They have a nice collection.

Family Fun
Family Fun is a nice proffessional site with a good selection, but they are mostly of layouts rather than background pages.

Activity Village
Activity Village has lots of free printable scrapbook paper designs. Use them for scrapbook albums, kids crafts, making gift boxes and bags, or as small pieces of wrapping paper for odds and ends and matching gift tags.

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Cutting Tools for Scrapbooking. Video Cutting Tools for Scrapbooking

Cutting Tools for Scrapbooking. Video Cutting Tools for Scrapbooking

Learn about cutting tools for scrapbooking and record memories in this free video on arts and crafts. Get scrapbooking and journaling ideas.

Scrapbooking Mini Brag Book Video Instructions

Scrapbooking Mini Brag Book Video Instructions.

This is a tutorial on creating a mini brag book - scrapbook album using double sided designer paper.