About Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking is essentially a hobby in which you can preserve personal and family history, memories and anything else that you want to in the form of a scrapbook. Some of the most common things that people add into scrapbooks include photographs, printed media, artwork, journalistic ideas and more. This is one hobby that is practiced extensively in the United States.

Commonplace books that was popular in England was probably the first time when someone came up with the idea of compiling personal information like recipes, photographs, quotations, poems and more. This was a concept that was popular during the 15th century. In the 16th century, friendship albums became popular and were like yearbooks that include names, details and some quotations of people who studies at the same time in an alumni. Some even created these kinds of albums to record the events of their European tours and included coat of arms, work of art and more. Around the middle of this century people started using plates to depict popular scenes as against original works of art; something that made scrapbooking more fun. Towards the end of the 18th century, James Granger published a book about the history of England and left a few blank pages at the end of the book. These were meant to allow the owner and reader of the book to personalize the book with any kind of memorabilia of his own. Over time this practice came to be known as grangerizing.

Photography in the manner that it is done today is considered to be one of the most significant events that changed scrapbooking. The mass production of Kodak Brownie allowed the average individual to take photographs and preserve them for later.

Marielen Christensen from Utah is credited with the change that scrapbooking went through when it turned from being merely a hobby to an entire industry in the United States. It was in 1980 when she completed about 50 volumes of creative pages or scrapbooking and exhibited them in the World Conference on Records in Salt Lake City. A scrapbook store was started soon after this exhibition and this store that sells materials for creative scrapbooking exists even today. It is estimated that the scrapbooking industry doubled in size between 2001 and 2004. It is estimated that y 2003 there were about 1600 companies that were selling scrapbooking material.

Scrapbooking is mainly done in an album that allows for additional pages to be inserted. There are mini albums and accordion style albums too that can be used. While scrapbooks use the standard A4 size (210mm by 297mm) smaller versions have also become popular recently. The most common of these new formats is the 6, 7 or 8 inch square albums that can be found in the market today. In this electronic age, digital scrapbooking as a hobby cannot be ignored too.

NOTE: Information on this site is not guaranteed to be accurate. Some content is compiled from 3rd party sources. If you are aware of incorrect or outdated information, feel free to contact us.