Byline: PHYLLIS SPEIDELL THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

PHOTOS, TICKET stubs, programs and faded flowers are escaping from shoe boxes and showing up in scrapbooks.

We're not talking traditional albums with thick pages and photos anchored by sticky black corners. These scrapbooks, a hot new hobby, are artfully designed tributes to treasured memories.

``I love my scrapbooks," Tommie Bass said, hugging two of her favorites to her heart. Bass has captured the highlights of her life in colorful, intensely personal scrapbooks.

Scrapbook specialty shops offer a wide array of tools and materials. Scrappers can get scenic page liners, borders and stickers; scissors that cut scallops and zigs and zags; paper punches in dozens of shapes; gel pens; and acid-free sprays to preserve and personalize photos and other mementoes.

The stores also hold classes, teaching the finer points of borders, journalizing and paperfolding.

Magazines devoted to scrapping feature outstanding scrapbooks and how-to stories. Scrapbook conventions from New Hampshire to Arizona draw thousands of crafters. Vacationers can scrap as they cruise aboard Carnival Cruise Line's several scrapbook cruises to the Bahamas and Caribbean.

Scrappers (also known as croppers) create scrapbooks - postcard-size minis to oversized volumes - focusing on family history, births and weddings as well as less happy topics such as funerals, divorces and house fires, says Robin Smith, Bass' daughter and owner of Treasured Memories, a scrapbook supply shop in Suffolk.

Smith's customers create books as gifts and personal keepsakes.

The birth of her first child, Connor, prompted Christine Davis of Norfolk to start a scrapbook for him using the same moon and stars theme that decorates his nursery.

Linda Silver, 47, created her first scrapbook recently as she recuperated from breast cancer surgery and underwent radiation treatment.

``I hated to throw away all the beautiful cards I had received, so I decided to make a scrapbook - like a thank-you for all the people who prayed for me,'' she said. ``It took a lot of time and kept my mind off what I was going through. It helped a lot.''

Silver, a Suffolk resident, used old calendar illustrations as color-coordinated backing for her favorite cards and added her own creative touches. Bass, 58, had done several books chronicling her children and grandchildren before she tackled a special project - the 1997 funeral of a close family friend. The friend, a former West Virginia coal miner, succumbed to black lung disease and was buried at the family farm in Farmville.

``They made the funeral a celebration of his life with family and friends,'' Bass said. ``I just took pictures of grandfathers and grandchildren, mothers and sons hugging, all in good taste with nothing morbid.''

Bass included a portrait of the man and his wife and drew in flowers, ivy and vines to create a keepsake for his family.

``Scrapbooking is an escape, because I don't think about work or other problems when I am doing it,'' she said.

At least a few men scrap, too.

Bill Belcher, 42, is a single parent and a security supervisor at the Surry Nuclear Power Plant. A former Norfolk police officer and college athlete who loves sports and riding his Harley, he found scrapbooking a way to connect with his two teen-age daughters.

``They are more academic than athletic,'' he said.

Belcher is also an amateur photographer, and scrapbooking is a good way to preserve and display some of the hundreds of photos he has shot.

A friend, Patricia Baxter, introduced Belcher and his daughters to the hobby. Baxter works at All About Scrapbooks, a scrapbook superstore at Chesapeake Square.

``I never realized there was that much to it other than putting a few borders on pictures,'' he said.

``I had boxes and boxes of photos that you don't really enjoy if you don't see them,'' Belcher said. ``Scrapbooking makes them more appealing, and it's an activity you can do with your children.''

Although he has taken a basic class at All About Scrapbooks and stops in the store occasionally, Belcher has seen only one other man in the shop.

``He was standing near the door, waiting for his wife,'' he said.

Reach Phyllis Speidell at 483-9161 or 222-5556.

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COLOR PHOTO

CANCER SURVIVOR LINDA SILVER...

COPYRIGHT 2001 The Virginian Pilot-Ledger Star. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the Dialog Corporation by Gale Group.