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The Progression of a Hobby

I've always been a creative person, but I can't draw or paint to save my life, so I found an outlet in a series of crafts that involve using other people's images to make my own items. When I was still in school I used to gather up old magazines and make elaborate COLLAGES on the covers of my schoolbooks every year, taped together as I went along, and covered with contact paper or strips of adhesive tape to try and protect them. Often the collages didn't last longer than a year or so before the cheap tape discoloured and ruined them but since my schoolbooks were essentially throw-away items, it didn't bother me. The few that I glued together instead of taping lasted much better, and although I no longer have the schoolbooks, they were still legible at least five years after they were made.

I didn't see any reason to continue making collages after I no longer had schoolbooks to cover, so I gave it away, until a few years later somebody mentioned the art of DECOS... decos are essentially little booklets of miniature collages that get passed from hand to hand until they are eventually filled up. I plunged into the world of deco-making with great excitement, and spent several years making them, before I realised that decos have several intrinsic problems that made them less than rewarding as a long-term activity. Like all activities that rely on a chain of people in succession to complete, they take a VERY long time to propogate, and you might never see them again if they get lost in the mail, or they're mailed to somebody who's moved house without changing their address, or to somebody who isn't interested in doing them any more, or who can't afford the rather expensive postage rates it takes to mail things around the world. So those booklets you make with great glee and send off into the world are highly unlikely to actually get back to you any time soon... and if you're lucky and they do come home, you might find that it's filled with pages that are not to your taste and make you wonder what on earth the decorator/s were thinking! (If you're interested in trying decos, don't let my experience put you off - if you live in a town/country where the art is popular you will probably get much better results than I did. I was living in Australia at the time, and most of my deco-making partners were in Europe or America, and international mail from Down Under is expensive and tediously slow...)

I was having fun making and mailing my collages, but it was less than fun to have to wait so long for them to come back to me, so I turned to a more immediately rewarding activity and joined a number of yahoo groups dedicated to the exchange of handmade GREETING CARDS. I started out making cards that were once again essentially miniature collages, and broadened my horizons as I learnt more elaborate techniques from the groups... I made cards for five years, and ended up with a big box full of beautiful trades, but at the same time as I was doing greeting cards I was discovering yet another paper-related hobby, which came to take up more time and effort than the cards - SCRAPBOOKING.

The first scrapbook I ever made was a small gift album for my fiance that I made for Valentines Day 2001.

In the end I made the difficult decision that I was going to give up card-making so I could devote my energy (and money) to my scrapbooks... and so here I am now, in 2007 as a scrapbooker... I still do swaps and trades, but now they are of scrapbooking items. I don't do whole-page swaps because I hate to be stuck with somebody else's vision for my pages (and the materials get very expensive when you have to make eight or ten completed pages for a single swap!) but I love swapping individual items that I can use in my own page designs. Last month a group I was in did a huge SCRAPBOOKING CHALLENGE