Crafts Beautiful Scrapbooking Workshop

Who loves scrapbooking?

Scrapbooking is an outlet for creative expressions as it’s a method for preserving personal and family history in the form of a scrapbook. Typical memorabilia include photographs, printed media, recipes, love letters and artwork. Scrapbook albums are often decorated and frequently contain extensive journaling. Scrapbooking is a widely practiced pastime in the United States (it’s a multi-billion dollar industry!) and there are so many resources offline and online to get inspirations on creating and producing different layouts.

I recently went to Crafts Beautiful for a scrapbooking workshop and whipped together a quick one-page layout.

Jenny Khoo, founder of Crafts Beautiful, has been teaching paper tole for 16 years. She started off by teaching small groups of Korean and Japanese housewives at their homes. She has travelled extensively to different parts of the world to learn different crafts and to source for unique and interesting craft ideas and materials. Crafts Beautiful is a one stop shop for crafts materials, craft classes, gifts and cards. Started off as a paper tole shop, it has since included scrapbooking, paper quilling and many other interesting crafts, as well as retailing gifts, cards and such.

Basic scrapbooking materials include background papers (printed or plain paper), photo corner mounts, scissors, a paper trimmer, art pens, archival pens for journaling, and mounting glues. More elaborate designs require more specialized tools such as die cut templates, rubber stamps, craft punches, stencils, inking tools, eyelet setters, heat embossing tools and personal die cut machines.

Various accessories and embellishments are also used to decorate scrapbook pages. These can include stickers, rub-ons, stamps, eyelets, brads, chipboard elements in various shapes, alphabet letters, lace, wire, fabric, beads, sequins, and ribbon.

One of the key components of modern scrapbooking is the archival quality of the supplies. Designed to preserve photographs and journaling in their original state, materials encouraged by most serious scrapbookers are of a higher quality than those of many typical photo albums commercially available. Scrappers insist on acid-free paper and materials (including the glue that’s used to stick the photos onto the paper). Older magnetic albums are not acid-free and will cause damage to the photos and memorabilia included in them.

Believe you me, I own a load of these materials but never put them into good use, due to lack of time to properly scrapbook. D’oh!

I started scrapbooking ten years ago (GASP!) and soon learned that it is more fun doing so while hanging out with friends. Also more economical to share materials because those pretty punchers, embellishments, colorful papers, rubber stamps and whatnots add up to a lot of money. When you scrapbook with friends and fellow “scrappers”, everyone can share and swap materials as well as inspire one another to create different layouts.

Many years ago, I hosted a scrapbooking/greeting card making tea party at my apartment and invited a handful of friends to spend a weekend afternoon together. That was a blast and everyone had a lot of fun. So uhm… scrapbooking party at my place soon, anyone?

Not unlike blogging, but on a much higher hands-on scale and a rather different creative platform, you need a subject in mind and select a theme to express your scrapbook layout. Some people attribute the increased interest in scrapbooking to a renewed passion for genealogy, while others say that it is an outlet for those interested in photography and graphic design. Scrapbooking allows you to play with photos much more so than with words, and that’s where you can get really creative and colorful. Go nuts with the embellishments, although keep in mind to be moderate otherwise your design may backfire on you.

At one point, I even jumped on the digital scrapbooking bandwagon and started creating designs online in an effort to save money (and time; I work a lot faster via computer). But alas, the result is not the same even though they are no less beautiful. There’s just something about holding the finished result in your hands and admiring the results in a physical album that feels much more precious than viewing layouts on a computer screen.

Below are some examples of my scrapbook pages, circa 2002-2004. Can you tell which is original (using paper) and which is digital?

As you can probably tell, my kitty is one of the subjects that I scrapped the most on. :P The above shows my almost-completed scrapbook layout, dedicated to my kitty again (yes, who else). I didn’t bring any photos of her to the class, so I left two blank spaces as placeholders and plan to add the photos in later.

You don’t need to bring photos to the workshop if you don’t have any available just yet. The important thing is the subject and theme of the design; photos can be added later on after the layout is completed.

Crafts Beautiful is currently offering a 1-for-1 promotion at S$45, for the month of October. Try your hand at a scrapbooking class at Crafts Beautiful soon, I think it’ll be quite a hit amongst the kids too!