Scrapbooking is a hobby that has been growing in popularity. The underlying goal is to preserve memories in a unique and creative way. A scrapbooker starts with a book and a set of memories — usually photos, clippings, and other small mementos — that he or she wants to preserve for the future.
Some scrapbookers put separate themes in separate books, whereas others reserve each individual spread — two adjacent pages of a book — for different themes. A theme can vary from a particular event, a holiday, or what life was like at a particular moment of time. One spread, for example, may be reserved for a birthday party, another for a wedding, and another for Halloween.
Instead of just placing photographs in a photo album, a scrapbooker aims to capture the feeling and the mood associated with his or her memories. Photographs are embellished with all sorts of additional items to help set the mood of a spread. Backgrounds, rubber stampings, cut-outs, die cuts, drawings, newspaper clippings, stickers, cards and other flat items are used to embellish the photographs to set the tone. When someone looks at a page in a photo album, he sees just a few photographs; when a person enjoys the pages of a well-executed scrapbook, he may be transported to a different time.
Let us imagine a birthday party captured in a scrapbook. The scrapbooker may start with a festive sheet of background paper and overlay it with photographs from the party. Then, one of the invitations is attached, along with a cutout from the party hats. Next, some thoughts about the party and some details are written on the page. Finally, confetti from the party is glued over the entire spread.
Getting involved in the hobby is not too expensive. There are elaborate tools that can add interesting effects to a scrapbook, but simple pages often have the most impact. Basic scrapbooking tools include scissors, paper, photographs and glue. As a scrapbooker progress into more advanced techniques, he or she can purchase cut-outs, stencils, colorful pens, templates, die-cutters, stickers, and other embellishments.