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“If you’re not married and you don’t have any children, then what do you have that’s worth putting in a scrapbook?”
She may have thought she was asking a real question, but all I heard was the bit about my life not being worthy of a scrapbook page. Ouch.
This line from Shimelle's week long look back at her scrapbooking history caught my breath. I'm sure my reaction would have been to crawl into a corner and never show my work again. Shimelle reacted differently and the scrapbooking world is better because of that.
This past week Shimelle has been looking back over her years of scrapbooking and telling the story of these years. She began in 1998 when she found a scrapbooking kit in a Big Lots:
The kit contained a cardboard 3-ring binder, ten page protectors, ten sheets of white cardstock, a dried up glue stick, some faded construction paper and a plastic shape template. And I did actually use all of the contents of this kit to make my very first scrapbook, a gift from the cast for the director of a play I was in that term. So if you haven’t figured it out, that means I can not hide my very first pages from the world. They are in someone else’s house. Sometimes this gives me nightmares. Because I remember just how terribly frightening those first ten pages were. And of course I was already taking it seriously—I had to double my investment by paying at least another $4 for a set of Crayola markers to make the beautiful titles and clever captions in that book. Imagine the beauty.
In 2000, she was scrapping with paper dolls.
Okay, time to be a bit more serious: my pages from the year 2000 still make me cringe, but there are a few things that I learned and there might even be a smidgen of style starting to show up. A tiny speck. Like smaller than dust, but still…let’s see.
Thing progressed for Shimelle from 2001 when she started entering her pages for magazines and contests. But in 2002, Shimelle had that encounter at an organized crop. The women were dubious of her supplies and baffled by the idea that she was scrapbooking pictures of herself. Later that year, Shimelle was approached to contribute to a project organized by Angie Pedersen, called The Book Of Me.
In the foreword, journaling guru Joanna Campbell Slan tells the story of a young mother dying of brain cancer, who spent her last days creating a legacy album about her life so her young sons have something to remember her by.
“She wanted them to know how much she loved them, and she wanted them to have a mother forever, even if she only existed in a picture album and in their memories. If she had had Angie’s book, her task would have been much simpler...
...The woman dying of cancer knew exactly how best to spend her final days. You and I have a responsibility to create the same loving journal for our own families. Let’s get to it...”
Would your children and loved ones have something to remember you by?
The Book Of Me project changed Shimelle; other people were becoming aware of her work.
As part of that project, I also started to field a lot of questions from people who I think had shared my thoughts but were too afraid to say anything at the time. Because the pages that graced the magazines usually had beautiful pictures of traditional families, it was often a little awkward to scrapbook something that wasn’t as perfect as a storybook. After several people asked me how I dealt with this in my albums, I wrote this article for Angie’s mailing list. To my knowledge, it was the first time something was published using the phrase “hidden journalling” (though there may very well be other sources first that I didn’t know about).
When you go read the entire series, make sure to click through to each Time Warp Video. Can't wait to see what happened to Shimelle in the next 5 years. She thinks she these years will be wrapped up in one more post.
Additional Reading on Hidden Journaling:
Nicole Humphrey takes it Back to the Basics.
Sharie used hidden journaling about her two Angel Boys.
Cricket used hidden journaling and pockets to hold money, ticket stubs and other ephemera in her Cambodia.mini-album.
Debra
