Scrapbooking is a hobby that has been growing in popularity. The underlying goal is to preserve memories in a unique and creative way. A scrapbooker starts with a book and a set of memories — usually photos, clippings, and other small mementos — that he or she wants to preserve for the future.
Some scrapbookers put separate themes in separate books, whereas others reserve each individual spread — two adjacent pages of a book — for different themes. A theme can vary from a particular event, a holiday, or what life was like at a particular moment of time. One spread, for example, may be reserved for a birthday party, another for a wedding, and another for Halloween.
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Instead of just placing photographs in a photo album, a scrapbooker aims to capture the feeling and the mood associated with his or her memories. Photographs are embellished with all sorts of additional items to help set the mood of a spread. Backgrounds, rubber stampings, cut-outs, die cuts, drawings, newspaper clippings, stickers, cards and other flat items are used to embellish the photographs to set the tone. When someone looks at a page in a photo album, he sees just a few photographs; when a person enjoys the pages of a well-executed scrapbook, he may be transported to a different time.
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Let us imagine a birthday party captured in a scrapbook. The scrapbooker may start with a festive sheet of background paper and overlay it with photographs from the party. Then, one of the invitations is attached, along with a cutout from the party hats. Next, some thoughts about the party and some details are written on the page. Finally, confetti from the party is glued over the entire spread.
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Getting involved in the hobby is not too expensive. There are elaborate tools that can add interesting effects to a scrapbook, but simple pages often have the most impact. Basic scrapbooking tools include scissors, paper, photographs and glue. As a scrapbooker progress into more advanced techniques, he or she can purchase cut-outs, stencils, colorful pens, templates, die-cutters, stickers, and other embellishments.