Divine scrapbooking
They 'crop,' they paste and 'journal' all for the sake of posterity. It's the most popular hobby in Canada

Samantha Grice
National Post
July, 2002

SCRAPPER POWER: In Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a daughter gains a more sympathetic understanding of her mother after seeing her scrapbook filled with mementoes.

It's a stifling hot Tuesday morning, the one after Canada Day, and the Lunch Bunch is beginning to gather, as they do every week, at the Cherished Scrapbooks superstore located in a strip mall in Mississauga, Ont.

Dianne Glass, who teaches scrapbooking techniques a few times a week, is already here. She's going to instruct the Getting Started class at 1 p.m.

Barb Clayton, one of the Lunch Bunchers, makes a purposeful entrance in denim overall shorts and T-shirt, her scrapbook suitcase and two of her three sons trailing behind her. The boys head off to the playroom and she unloads her various tools on to the studio table. Barb does identical scrapbooks for her kids (they have four each already) and today she is doing a page around photos she took of her eldest and youngest sons sitting at the dining room table making comic books. She has found a border that says "Creative Corner," she has cropped her photos (cropping means trimming photos to get rid of excess background to create more focus on the subject) and is cutting out drawings of pencils and then pasting them on to her carefully chosen background page. After that, she will "journal" a few sentences about what the photos mean to her.

Sitlan Soo comes in a bit later, also wheeling a hefty suitcase. "I went to get my results," she says, explaining that a doctor's appointment made her late. "Everything is OK."

Dianne looks at her bag, "Did you bring lunch?"

"No, just some groceries."

"OK, we'll share those," Dianne says, and then lets loose a jolly guffaw.

Debbie Haime is also at the table. She's not scrapbooking but chatting and answering the phone. She started working at Cherished Scrapbooks last summer after taking one of Dianne's beginner courses. "Then I came back and took another one called Extraordinary Accents and I said, 'You can do all this with a scrapbook!' Then I decided I had to come in here and start working so I could afford to scrapbook."

Sitlan started scrapbooking after visiting the Canadian Rockies. "The pictures were so beautiful I decided to start there. Of course Dianne is helping me a lot," she says solemnly.

"She's like the little bird that doesn't want to leave the nest yet," Dianne explains.

This latest scrapbooking phenomenon started about 10 years ago in the western United States, then headed up the coast to Canada and has now started to gain momentum in the east. The Canadian Craft and Hobby Industry says it's without a doubt currently the most popular hobby. The editor of Scrapbook Stores Across America puts the number of stores at about 1,400.

These shops are more than just places to refill your supply of paper dolls, teddy bear stickers, spooky Halloween-themed title pages, punches, rubber stamps, page toppers and "Some Bunny Loves You" borders.

They also arrange extravaganzas such as Scrapbook Get-a-Way Weekends (Central Iowa); Gotta Crop Retreat (California); Scrappin' and Stampin' Road Tour: A full day of shops, lunch, games, prizes and lots of fun! (Orange County); ScrapBook Expo (San Diego); and a Western Caribbean Scrapbook Cruise (seven nights departing from Galveston, Tex.). And that's just the tip of the iceberg of scrapbooking events going on at this very moment.

One of the major reasons for the hobby's popularity, say scrappers, is the posterity aspect -- all the products sold in scrapbook stores are acid-free, which means the keepsakes inside won't fade and turn yellow. If you want to paste in newspaper clippings or other "unsafe" material you can first spray it with an archival mist that keeps the acid inside. "Then I still wouldn't put it against my photos, but I would mat it on another piece of acid-free paper so the acid can't migrate on to my photos after," says Dianne.

The Lunch Bunch is smaller than usual today as a few people are on summer vacation. "Normally on a Tuesday there are six that come and they bring a potluck lunch and have a really good day together. It's very social," says Dianne.

The social factor is one of the reasons owner Lisa Fedele opened her shop and set up programs such as the Don't Stay At Home Mom Crop.

Fedele is the mother of four children between the ages of five and eight. "When I was home I was feeling alienated from the world. Scrapbooking was my hobby and the hobby of so many other women and I thought there must be other women who feel like this. That's why we have the playroom. It's an opportunity for moms to bring their kids while they socialize. I felt strongly the community needed a gathering place for women." Fedele says scrapbook clubs are the sisterhood of the new millennium.

Cherished Scrapbooks' 4,000- square-foot store stocks more than 7,000 items and has a "studio" for classes, a kitchen for potlucks and a playroom, video room and classroom for kids. Every Friday night they are open from 7 p.m. to midnight for the Thank Goodness It's Friday crop. And on the first Friday of the month, the evening has a special theme. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, they held a Midnight Madness Aloha Hawaii Night and in June they they hosted a Ya-Ya Sisterhood crop party to pay homage to a scrapper's favourite book (and now film) Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells.

In Divine Secrets, a bitter, sour-faced New York playwright and her bitter, sour-faced Southern belle mother patch up their passive-aggressive, phone-slamming relationship after a scrapbook filled with photographs, letters, clippings, invitations and death notices reveals to the daughter her mother's deep, dark secrets. It is through the scrapbook that the daughter gains a more sympathetic understanding of her mom.

A gaggle of women from Cherished Scrapbooks and Oshawa's Scrapbook Emporium put on silly Ya-Ya hats and went to the film's Toronto premiere.

Rhonda McMichael of Toronto, who doesn't belong to any of the scrapbook clubs, also went to see the film and a few summers ago read the book with her book club. After the movie she was inspired. "I thought a scrapbook was such a phenomenal idea and that it was neat to have four friends that close," she says. "The closest we had to that is our book club. We've been meeting every month since 1997 and during that time lots of things have happened, marriages, kids born, breakups, there have been so many life events."

McMichael is going to create a scrapbook for her club that matches the books they've read with the life events that coincided with them, pasting in copies of the book covers, photographs, business cards and tidbits about the members' lives. And even though she has a 7-month-old baby (the quintessential scrapbook subject) she's going to limit her scrapbooking to the book club. In fact after doing Internet research on the subject of scrapbooking, she found the hugeness of the hobby a bit weird.

Weird is one way of putting it. "There's even a joke that we all dress our kids in colours that match the paper we want to use that week," Dianne says, and then bursts out laughing.

"I can't say I've ever done that," says Barb, "but I have restaged events that I forgot to take pictures of, like I've put the kids back in their Halloween costumes."

Barb's eldest son recently went on a class trip and took a camera with him specifically so that Barb could later scrapbook the pictures. Her husband doesn't take quite that level of interest in her hobby, but she says he shows her work off when people come over.

"I find that husbands always groan, 'Oh great, she's going to the scrapbook store again, we're going to spend more money,' " says Dianne. "But they're the first ones to bring it out when someone comes in. He'll say, 'Oh show her your album, hon.' And I'm like, 'Oh never mind!' and he says, 'No! Show it!'

"So they're proud."