I Detest Scrapbooking

I had a friend in Junior High who got really mad if anyone ever used the word “hate.” Her mom told her she could not use that word because it was so harsh. So she used the word “detest” instead. As in, “I just detest Sarah. She’s so lame.” Muuuuuch nicer, no?

So, in honor of her, I thought I’d use it in my title.

Back to scrapbooking. I love the idea of preserving memories, of having pictures the family can handle and feel, not just stuck on the computer. I hate/detest the idea of buying bows and dye-cuts (I finally figured out what those were), bells and miniature baby shoes, papers for every occasion, hole-punches the shape of my uterus for when I’m pregnant, small bits of carpet, and teeny-tiny disco balls for the pages about when Laylee and I go clubbing.

My friend is a mad-scientist-inventor-type person and she feels the same way about scrapbooking that I do. So, instead of talking to “a guy she knows” and having Sandi’s Palace of Scrapbooking Paraphernalia burned to the ground in a horrible tragic “accident”, she started talking to patent lawyers and invented these new photo/scrapbook/box/display/holder thingies.

I am in love with them and have practically spent my children’s college savings buying them. (They may one day lament their lack of education, but at least they’ll have their memories to look through, entombed in bonded leather.)

Here’s how they work (Vanna, please):

On the outside they look like a box:

But when you open the heavy-duty (but not too hard to open) gripper/snaps:

They are albums:

They come in several sizes:

I bought small ones that hold 2 4x6 photos per sheet to use as gifts and the really big ones that hold 12x12 sheets for our family.

You can use just about any configuration of photos in them. Most of the sheets I bought just hold scads and scads of 4x6 photos but a few are full 12x12 sheets or split sheets so I can get creative here and there if I want, but I don’t have to.

They even have kits to make the little scrapbooky pages if you want them. They are super heavy-duty fabric or bonded leather, reasonably priced (if you don't buy one million of them), they’re gorgeous and durable.

You add the photos from the inside of a two-sided sheet, sideways so the pictures won’t come out if you shake the book around and your kids can’t figure out how to get them out. Heck, I couldn’t figure it out until she showed me.

I am so excited for my new project for after Christmas and it will mostly involve shoving all of our old photos in at a rapid pace, periodically pausing to add a caption, a colored paper background or a picture of my face, cut out in the shape of an armadillo. I’m sure they have punches for that somewhere, right mom?