Say Cheese!

The other day about eighty thousand Christians gathered at the State Capitol for Luis Palau’s Twin Cities Festival. Just a mile away, at St. Paul’s RiverCentre, a smaller but no less devoted crowd convened at the Midwest Scrapbook Association Convention, the better to observe the objects of its own faith—designer paper and vellum and bottle caps. These are the icons of the Holy Order of Scrapbooking. (Yes, it’s one word. And yes, like “journaling,” it’s now a verb.)

Like religion, the $4.5 billion scrapbooking industry is driven by fervor and motivated by guilt. “I do think a lot of it is guilt,” laughed Carrie Ingalls, who has worked in the biz since 1989 and is currently a manufacturer rep for a company called Bobo Co. It’s those neglected piles of photos that you’ve boxed and tucked away, she explained, never bothering to label or stick in a photo album. You feel like you should do something nice with them. And once you start to assemble them in scrapbooks, she said, “It’s an addiction.”

So how do laziness and avoidance translate into monomania? The novice scrapbooker is faced with a dizzying array of choices that go way beyond simple page layout. There are decorated papers, ribbons, buttons, glitter, stickers to commemorate everything from a trip to the zoo to a trip down the aisle, inspirational quotes on vellum, inspirational quotes on ribbons, and so on. In a modern scrapbook, the photos hardly matter. It’s all about the “design concept” of each page. This can require, for example, flattened and decorated bottlecaps stuck to the page with Dots candies.

Hoping to score a free copy of Simple Scrapbooks magazine, I leafed through a copy under the watchful eye of a booth-minder. “See?” she said proudly. “It will show you how to get started, what product you need, and how to organize a page, so that you can get more photos on the page and still tell the story.”

Aren’t the photos supposed to tell the story? Apparently not. Or they’re just not saying enough. A sample page on one vendor’s wall, for example, displayed a single photo of a newborn baby. It was nested in a congeries of striped pink and blue paper, surrounded by cutouts and ribbons trumpeting the definitions for words like precious, miracle, treasure, laughter, and blessing.

“This is never going to go away,” said C.D. Cross, an affable man who claims the title of first male designer in the industry. (Before that, he was a softball coach.) He tipped me off to two significant industry trends: torn paper and brads. Brads? “Like Brad Pitt,” he said. (Oh, now the appeal of scrapbooking is becoming more clear!) C.D. showed me a little tack-like doohickey that you can use to attach your paraphernalia to the page, to give it a kind of rustic look. A designer and representative for Outdoors & More, decidedly the most masculine booth at the convention, C.D. said scrapbooking is “the fastest-growing craft in America.”

“I think it’s replaced quilting,” agreed Carrie Ingalls. “It’s an excuse to get together. It feels good to you personally, to do it, and to share it with others. And it really is also sort of an addiction. People can’t have enough supplies. They’re always looking for the next thing.”

Many of the biggest scrapbooking companies are headquartered in Utah, and the Mormon interest in recording genealogy is most often cited as the progenitor of the country’s current cutting and pasting craze. It is an enthusiasm that accelerates during troubled times. Ingalls told us there was a huge surge in sales after 9/11. “That hurt a lot of industries,” she said. “But we grew by leaps and bounds. People are so passionate about this…it’s something they live.”

Over at a booth for an Oakdale store called Paige’s In Time, a woman wore a nametag that said “Marni Fabulous.” She had a captive audience as she demonstrated The Wizard, an embossing gadget that sells for $149.99. Like one of the hucksters at the State Fair’s horticulture building, Marni had a crowd of women in the palm of her hand—laughing and waiting breathlessly for an embossed gift tag to shoot out the other end of The Wizard—when she spotted a man in the vicinity. “Man alert! Man alert!” she shouted. “Man at the booth! Do not look at the man! Do not talk about the cost of golf clubs!” Even Marni’s victim laughed, because it was true: There weren’t a lot of guys.

When I asked Jackie Schoenbauer from Jordan about the convention’s abundance of estrogen, she said, “You know, the husbands have their hobbies. We can spend money, too.” (The average amount plunked down per visit to a store like Archivers, according to two insiders, is somewhere between forty and two hundred dollars.)

Schoenbauer came to the convention with her friend, Chrissy Kampen, from Lakeville. Both are twenty-nine years old; both are married. “It took me a year just to put my wedding album together,” said Schoenbauer, explaining that each page had to be just a little bit different. Said Kampen, “We’re a year or two behind with our photos. I don’t foresee us being current any time soon.”
—Shannon Olson


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