Newsday
09-24-1998
Remembrances Of Things Past / Scrapbooks are becoming a national
craze. SIDEBARS: 1) Other Peoples' Memories 2) Preserving Photo
Finishes (see end of text).
By Carol Polsky. STAFF WRITER.
YOU KNOW those photos gathering dust in a box somewhere? You may soon
find yourself taking a deckle shears to them and tossing around words
like die-cut and template.
A scrapbook revival is emerging as one of the biggest trends to hit
the hobby and craft industries in years. While photo albums and
scrapbooks have long been a staple of family life and especially of
mothers, the last few years have seen it grow into a communal - and
commercial - craze.
It's especially popular in the western states where it first
emerged, but is growing in popularity in the Northeast, where store
managers like those at Pearl Paint in East Meadow report supplies
"flying off shelves."
"It's addictive," said Marcy Schwarz, a floral designer who also
gives scrapbook classes at Creativity, the craft store in Westbury where
she works. "I get scrapbooking tools for holidays and birthdays and I
love it."
No more album pages sedately covered edge to edge in photographs. "I
can't do that any more," said the mother of two, whose colorfully
graphic albums are full of decorative elements like pop-up houses with
window flaps opening to reveal photos, and elaborate backgrounds of
cut-paper tuxedos and stylized film strips.
"I know when I take a picture what I'm going to do with it," said
Schwarz. "I know what the background will be. You'll find most
scrapbookers are like that."
It's been called the quilting bee of the '90s: women gather for
scrapbook parties, and Scrap-a-thons lasting for hours. They go on
scrapbook cruises. They click onto 20 or so
scrapbook Web sites and
subscribe to two scrapbook magazines. They travel to scrapbook
conventions and spend hours cutting out colorful paper pumpkins and fall
leaves, Christmas ornaments and school buses to illustrate their themed
pages.
The products available for purchase fill several store aisles now:
from albums and scrapbooks to photo-safe pages, plastic page protectors
and storage boxes, dozens of types of scissors (like the deckle shears)
that cut decorative rather than straight edges or curled corners on
photographs and pages; pigma pens that don't fade or bleed for
lettering, special adhesives, mounting corners, confetti-like strips,
paper photo frames in themed shapes like Christmas ornaments and
schoolbuses, stickers, rubber stamps, and colorful themed background
paper. There are templates - (like stencils, these are hard plastic
sheets with cut-outs of letters or shapes. The scrapbooker uses them to
guide her pencil to trace the shapes onto paper, which she then cuts out
and pastes onto her pages.) And there are die-cuts: blocks in which
sharp raised outlines are embedded. The outline is pressed against a
paper to cut out the desired shape.
Sales in the scrapbook market were uncharted only a few years ago
but are now very roughly estimated by the Hobby Industry Association at
$250 million for 1997.
"I think anyone who makes anything remotely associated with
scrapbook-type products are customizing their products to sell to
scrapbookers," said Cathryn Wooton, who helped develop Hallmark's new
scrapbook kits, which supply stickers, background sheets, die-cut
shapes, borders and frames.
Wooton, herself a longtime scrapbooker, described what she thought
was the appeal of the hobby. "It's this low-tech pleasure in a high-tech
world. It's one thing you can still touch, cut and paste." (However,
computer graphic programs are popular with scrapbookers and a computer
company, DogByte Development, has just come out with its Creative Photo
Albums Deluxe, for designing and printing album pages and digital
albums.)
"Scrapbooking is one of those things where you can work with what you
have or spend $50 to $70 every time you walk into the store," said Susan
Brandt, assistant executive director of Hobby Industry Association, a
trade group. "You can cut shapes from wrapping paper or greeting cards
with an old pinking shears or buy 20 different kinds of scissors.
"Doing this as a family, it captures their experiences," she said.
"It reinforces family memories."
For Adele Nargentino, 30, of Bethpage, her new hobby began last year
when her sister-in-law, herself a scrapbook enthusiast, gave her a
wedding album at her bridal shower along with scrapbook supplies.
"I always felt I wanted to make a scrapbook," she said. "I feel like
I'm a creative person and it's how I can express it. If I show people
and they say `Wow, how'd you do that?,' it feels good."
It's hard to find the time, she said, but it's good relaxation
therapy when she does: "I like the stickers and all the different types
of papers and borders . . . and I love the die cuts." After a visit to
Florida, she recorded the trip in her scrapbook: "I did Sea World and of
course I have the dolphins and the water."
Now her mother, Gloria Hasson, is creating an album of her own baby
pictures in an antique style. A friend is also gung-ho after Nargentino
gave her an album and supplies for her baby shower. "She's been working
on it nonstop and she says thank you for showing her because it's so
much fun."
Nargentino and her mother attend classes with Deanna Wendt, a sales
representative for a growing direct-marketing company called Creative
Memories, which sells its own line of scrapbook products. Active in the
scrapbook movement from early on, it's grown from six sales
representatives in 1987 to more than 37,000 nationwide.
Catalog companies are also experiencing business gains due to the
scrapbook trend: Exposures, which markets handsome higher-end albums and
scrapbook supplies, frames and display items, is devoting more space to
scrapbooks, as are companies such as Light Impressions and University
Products, which sell many products generally only used by conservators.
Wendt, of Kings Park, and Arlene Bookbinder, of Greenlawn, a former
nurse who also works for Creative Memories, are active scrapbookers
themselves. They say they emphasize the preservation and documentation
of family photos and information as opposed to a purely decorative
approach.
"We emphasize in our classes to put the photos in simply and to
journalize," meaning to write about the events shown in the photos, said
Wendt. She sees a trend in scrapbooking to "do very cutesy, creative
pages, but the emphasis is not on the photos. It's on how to decorate
the page."
Wendt, 32, who has two young children, said she got into scrapbooking
out of an interest in her family genealogy. A great-great grandfather
helped found Denver just before the Civil War, she said.
Bookbinder made an album using old photos of her husband's family
retrieved from an ice-damaged attic. His great-grandfather is John
Sutter, she said, at whose mill the first gold of the California gold
rush was discovered.
"I stay up till 2 and 3 in the morning journalizing, putting my
pictures into albums," said Bookbinder, 55. "It made me much more aware
of our ancestry and what we can tell our children."
They encourage clients and classes to write captions or journal-type
entries on every page. Very few people, Wendt points out, know much
about their family further back than their grandparents. "If we're not
documenting the photos we take today, we'll be in the same situation,
photos thrown in boxes, names and circumstances forgotten," she said.
"If people are not going to journal, they might as well put the photos
to the curb, because by the second generation after, no one's going to
remember."
Geri Solomon, university archivist / conservator for Hofstra
University, says scrapbooks to preserve mementos and record experiences
have been around since the last century, when they were very popular
with the Victorians.
Since photos were not widely available, most of those old
scrapbooks contained printed materials and relics: a dried corsage, a
dance card, a ticket, a menu, a play program, a post card or a newspaper
article. She spends much of her time preserving old student
scrapbooks, often from sororities, fraternities and clubs, and says
they have "remained consistent as to the things they chronicled: social
events, dances, sports . . . The medium for capturing the moment has
changed."
What hasn't changed, she said, is "the motivation to capture those
moments, that time period in their lives. That is the constant."
Other Peoples' Memories
FOR SOME PEOPLE, the fascination with scrapbooks comes from collecting
old ones. This late 19th-Century Victorian book, containing calling,
greeting and trade - or business - cards was purchased in an
Internet auction on eBay, an auction Web site for collectibles of all
kinds. Antique shops also sell scrapbooks, but it may be hard to find
one in good condition. Victorian albums containing scrap and cards like
the one shown here generally sell for $75 to more than $200, depending
on size, condition, number of pages and desirability of the contents.
Albums with a large number of cards usually command the highest prices.
- Polsky
Preserving Photo Finishes
IF THE CHEMICALS don't savage them, the magnetic page protectors might.
Such is the indignity that can await photographs and clipped
mementos so lovingly curated by the average family. Acids from
traditional paper albums and scrapbooks nibble at aging photographic
paper and fabrics, or worse, combine with their natural enemies -
exposure to light and to changes in temperature and humidity. And
careless handling or storage can take a toll.
But a growing awareness of photos' fragility has fed a recent
interest in using better materials for their preservation - and a
willingness to pay the higher costs associated with photo-safe products
used by conservators.
As the chemically unstable color snapshots of the 1950s and 1960s
have faded, home photo collectors have taken note. Album papers - full
of corrosive acids used in paper processing and a harmful naturally
occurring substance called lignin - were eating away at the paper
backing of the photos, while polyvinylchlorides (PVC) in the plastic
sheet covers and sleeves were eating away at them from the front.
Magnetic plastic sheet covers, combined with the sticky surface of
the page, were the most destructive, chemically cooking the photo within
four to 10 years.
There's a way to fight back, photo preservationsists say. Photo-safe
products are now widely available, although some products may be
mislabeled or may contain other damaging ingredients. Check labels to
see that products are completely PVC-, acidand lignin-free.
Plastics must not contain PVC or plasticizers (plastic-softening
chemicals). Polyester (trade name Mylar) plastic page protectors and
sleeves are good, as are those made of polypropylene and polyethylene.
Although some glues are sold as photo-safe, many preservationists
prefer to mount photos in corners adhered to the page, rather than put
glue on the back of the photo itself.
John Dunphy, marketing director for University Products of Holyoke,
Mass. - a respected manufacturer of archival-quality supplies for
libraries, museums and, increasingly, individuals - cautions that
there are no real enforceable standards behind the use of the term
"archival" now used for so many commercial products. Some products may
be free of some damaging ingredients, he said, but contain others
equally bad. Make sure, for example, that a PVC-free plastic page
protector is also free of plasticizers.
There are things you can do to preserve your photos or lessen the
damage in addition to putting them into these safer products, say photo
preservationists.
University Products, for example, sells UV protective glass and
protective plexiglass to cut light exposure. The plexiglass costs $5.60
for an 8-by-10-inch sheet, glass costs $50 for four 11-by-14-inch
sheets. Also available are packages of UV protective polyester page
protectors for albums, at $23 for 50 sheets.
Here are some hints from Geri Solomon, Hofstra University
archivist-conservator:
- Get old photo albums out of the basement and the attic, and into a
more stable environment. The best locations may be the bedroom closet or
under the bed.
-Light fades. Keep all documents and original photographs out of the
light. Consider making duplicates of framed photographs on display and
keeping the original in storage. Or keep the negative safely stored. You
can also make color photocopies of photos to use in scrapbooks and
safely store the original.
-Don't touch. Wear white cotton gloves while handling original photos or
documents to avoid damaging them with the oils from your fingertips.
-Store different types of materials in separate storage boxes to avoid
adverse chemical interactions. Acid can migrate from newspaper clippings
to other material. Keep color photos in one box, black-and-white photos
in another, and negatives in another in safe plastic enclosures. For
easy retrieval, label both negatives and photos with the same
information.
-Don't use wooden cabinets or plastic containers, which may emit
damaging gases and chemicals as they age. Use sturdy, acid-free archival
boxes.
-Get advice from professionals, such as professional framers, before
doing anything you can't easily undo.
If you can't transfer old photos into new safer albums, put good quality
rag bond paper with a watermark in between each of the pages to minimize
contact and the migration of acids.
-Never use magnetic photo albums with plastic sheets covering the
photos.
-Black-and-white photographs are far more stable than color photos.
-Spend the money to put only your best photos into archival quality
albums and storage. "Reserve archival albums for the wonderful photos
that capture your family for posterity. The ones with the heads cut off
you can put in a box and let them fend for themselves," said Solomon.
Here are some mail-order sources for catalog supplies:
Exposures: 800-572-2502 or 800-222-4947.
Light Impressions: 800-828-6216.
University Products: 800-628-1912.
The Hollinger Corp.: 703-671-6600.
Gaylord Bros.: 800-448-6160.
For a referral to a local Creative Memories representative, call
800-341-5275. - Carol Polsky
Copyright 1998, Newsday Inc.