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Born to Crop

The addictive allure of scrapbooking

by Adrienne Martini

Some of your best friends are junkies. These addicts walk among the unafflicted, blending seamlessly into the fabric of everyday life and developing their own jargon to mask their behaviors from the uninitiated. Their pusher(wo)men don't feed like ticks on crime's fluffy underbelly. Instead, they set up brightly-lit shops, pay taxes, have TV shows, and host charming in-home classes. Their clients, however, can't seem to stop their compulsive behavior once they catch that first buzz.

"Join us on the dark side," sprightly scrapbooker Beth Cooper-Libby entreats. Welcome to the wonderful world of croppin'.

If nothing else, people are wonderful collectors of life's detritus. Ticket stubs, faded flowers, snapshots, postcards—at least one box of this sort of flotsam lurks in virtually every human's closet or under the world's beds. For centuries, a few hardy souls have felt compelled to organize their crap and fasten these relatively flat trinkets to pages, forming memory books. Some of these collections can be as simple as photos clipped to the opening pages of a family Bible; historically important collections are housed in the Library of Congress. We are the magpies of the primate world.

Lately, however, an entire industry has grown up around this ages-old habit. Modern scrapbookers have a plethora of new products to choose from. Glossy magazines devoted to nothing but this craft cram local racks. Several national corporations that have independent consultants a la Tupperware have sprung up and one, Creative Memories, made $282 million last year and has more than 600,000 consultants worldwide.

In some ways, Knoxville seems to be the center of the scrapbook storm. One of our local scrapbooking emporiums, Scrapbooks and More, recently quadrupled its retail space and offers 20-25 classes per month. But, more importantly, Knoxville is home to the DIY channel, which is in turn home to the "Diva of Die-cuts" Sandi Genovese's scrapbooking show and crop parties.

While Genovese has kept her own scrapbooks since the early '70s, she dipped her toe into this exponentially expanding industry when she was first exposed to die-cutting equipment—a simple machine that is used to cut perfect shapes from paper—when she was a teacher. By 1986, she'd written a book about scrapbooking and appeared on crafts queen Carol Duvall's show. After that, scrapbooking, which had previously only been popular in California and Utah, started setting up fixed camps in the country's rumpus rooms. Genovese's show, which started as a simple five-part series on DIY, has already aired 65 episodes, and Genovese is in Knoxville taping 65 more.

"It seems to be everywhere," Genovese says. "In the very beginning, people would say 'scrapbooking, what is that?' Now everyone has a sister or an aunt or a niece or somebody who does it. Or they do it themselves. In the last six years, it has grown 600 percent."

As proof of scrapbooking's popularity, Genovese gets recognized fairly frequently—and not just at scrapbook-related events. Flight attendants seem particularly likely to know who Genovese is. And, recently, she was stopped in an airport to sign a fan's cast.

According to Genovese, scrapbooking is addictive simply because the process unleashes vibrant memories, no matter who the recipient of the album may be.

"You're remembering, for example, when your dad bought corsages for the family for Easter. All of your memories are surrounding you. You're enveloped in that good feeling," she says, "and it's stronger in the initiator."

The act of sorting pictures and attaching them to pages can also be a cathartic experience, according to Creative Memories consultant Debbie Greenwood.

"I have a friend whose daughter was graduating from high school and she did an album from birth to high school. She worked on it for a long, long time. By the time she was through with that, she was really ready to let her go," Greenwood remembers.

Greenwood is a scrapbooker herself and has been in the croppin' biz for a year and a half. Before becoming a consultant, Greenwood had completed one album, a journal of a special family vacation to Europe. In the last 18 months, however, Greenwood has completed ten.

"The more I thought about it, the more I thought—I've got so many photos that are in boxes and I've got to get them out of boxes because they're not doing me any good in there. I decided that this is something I value, that is worthwhile and that this is what I'm going to do," Greenwood says. "Why are you taking pictures, if you're not going to do something with them?"

Creative Memories, of course, has plenty of solutions. This Minnesota-based company sells all of the stuff—from the albums themselves to stickers to die cuts to fancy papers to binders for organizing all of your stickers and die cuts and papers—that any scrapbooker could crave. Local consultants hold home classes and workshops. In these classes, new techniques (and the products that support them, natch) are introduced. In workshops, scrapbookers can get together for a crop, the craft's equivalent of a quilting bee, where each scrapbooker brings a project to the party and gets to work surrounded by like-minded enthusiasts.

Your scrapbooking dollars can just as easily be spent locally. Scrapbooks and More holds classes in tools, journaling, stamping, embossing, punching and all points in between. Just striding through the store's door leads to sticker-shock. Four thousands square feet of scrapbooking supplies spread before you, rousing the appetite of the junkie cropper.

"When I started scrapbooking, there was plain paper, there was colored paper, there were plain die-cuts and very simple stickers," says manager Sandra Hall, who has been practicing her hobby for seven years. "Now it's so sophisticated. And you have everything from it's-all-done-for-you for the new scrapbooker to things for people like me who want to do more themselves."

It would take as much time to describe what is in the average scrapbook as it would to describe each individual who creates one. For example, Cooper-Libby shares a story of one of her fellow scrapbookers whose mother died during her sister's birth. "After age two, [my friend's memories] of her mother stops. This is her way to reconnect with her mom," she says.

Some universals do emerge, however, from the diverse quilt of unique albums. Most are colorful endeavors that celebrate all of life's more wonderful moments—new babies, weddings, trips. Most albums seem to be wholesome endeavors, with beautifully presented photos and wonderfully evocative hand-written anecdotes. There is nothing wrong with that.

But for a person who likes to commemorate the bad and the good in order to fully celebrate what life really is, the absence of these more taxing elements of existence simply screams. The pages of most scrapbooks don't mention the bout of tourista that plagued that trip to Mexico or the embarrassing racial slurs of Uncle Stewart at your cousin's wedding or the hemorrhoids that accompanied your precious baby's birth. (This could, of course, simply be a personal quirk and not an impulse shared by the population at large.)

Perhaps this is what makes scrapbooking so addictive—the ability to edit our life's events and present what remains in handmade frames. Everyone, in his or her secret heart of hearts, aches to crop.