Scrapbooking
is a method for preserving a legacy of written history in
the form of photographs, printed media, and memorabilia
contained in decorated albums, or scrapbooks. Historically,
scrapbooking was a tradition similar to storytelling, but
with a visual and tactile, rather than oral, focus. Scrapbooking
in its earliest form was a way to blend ephemera, memorabilia
collections and journaling. People have been scrapbooking
since printed material became available to the average person.
Some of the earliest and most famous American scrapbookers
include Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain.Scrapbooking with
photographs has been around since photos became available.
Old scrapbooks tended to have photos mounted with photo
mount corners and perhaps notations of who was in a photo
or where and when it was taken. They often included bits
of memorabilia like newspaper clippings, letters and so
on.
Modern scrapbooking has evolved into creating
attractive displays of photos, text, journaling and memorabilia.
As of August 2006, the commercial scrapbooking industry
celebrated 25 years of existence, as started by Marielen
(pronounced Mary Ellen) W. Christensen of Keeping Memories
Alive, the worlds first scrapbooking store (which then had
a different name), headquartered in Spanish Fork, Utah,
in 1981. Scrapbooking as an industry has its roots in 1976,
when Christensen began designing creative pages for her
family’s photo memories. She inserted her memory pages
into a new product called sheet protectors and placed them
inside 3-ring binders. By 1980, she had assembled over fifty
volumes of family memories, and was invited that year to
display her albums and demonstrate her concept at the World
Conference on Records in Salt Lake City. That conference
opened the door to a massive interest in memory book design
in the United States, and Christensen was invited to give
seminars and teach classes to countless groups, including
Brigham Young University’s Campus Education Week and
numerous church, civic and school groups.
During the following 25 years, she lectured
continually throughout the Intermountain West. In addition
to her many lectures, Marielen and her husband AJ authored
and published the first how-to book on organizing and preserving
family memories, called Keeping Memories Alive. Not only
were they the founders of the first scrapbook store in 1981
and later name it after this book in 1993, the Christensens
began a mail-order division in the back of the building.
The business grew very quickly by word of mouth and had
to move its warehousing to a larger facility in 1994, and
its shipping department to a larger one in 1998
Scrapbook Totes
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