a president, a King
13 years ago
30 August 2006
Is it OK if I take up scrapbooking? I've avoided it on principle for so long, but lately, I've forgotten what the principle was. And hey, when you were a kid, did your mom tell you that you could remember the difference between "principle" and "principal" by remembering that the school principal is your pal? Did your mom say that too? Did she ever say, upon getting in the car in the evening, "Let's just try to have a quiet ride home"? Did yours say that too?
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oh absoooolutely.
first of all, if knitting (stiching and bitching that is)and quilting (fabric art)have finally been embraced as a kind of creative outlet liek painting and writing in a material kind of way then why not.
oh and i so get the staying away on principle. because my recollections of scrapbooking were of the creative memory kind where there was this sort of cheesy template you put your pictures in and had to add a die-cut star and headlines in cutesy fonts like "super fun!" that sort of made your pictures look like a thrid grade craft project. that's what i thought anyhow. and the women who did these were the same women who sold you tupperware (or i guess now it's pampered chef) and had six snotty kids and plenty of love handles and only took their family out together to church on sunday and then cocos for lunch.
ok, so that was my whole impression. and being a mom in the suburbs where like the stay-at-home double jogging stroller and mommy and me play groups is like the rule it really freaked me out. but here's the thing. those scrapbooking moms creative memories or otherwise were doing something. they were finding an outlet for their creativity. they were to borrow some qvc phrase "making memories." and maybe taking scrapbook all-nighter classes and scrapbook cruises were the only moments when they felt like the individual creative woman and the collective mom could coexist. and maybe it was the only time they got to pee alone if you knwo what i mean.
and then it's like what were all those stereotypes based on? my own fears on what being a mom here means. like the i-will-never-get-a-minivan type. but you just do what you need to do to survive.
ok, and back to knitting and quilting. so suddenly you're not just making cable knit sweaters in cream itchy yarn but these gorgeous angora rainbow leg warmers. and move over log-cabin because you've appliqued a vangogh with purple ribbon.
and my out-of-the closet scrapbooking came from the realization that i've been doing it since i was nine and collected all the pamphlets from wall drug to the lincoln monument from our family cross-country road trip and put them in a binder with construction paper and my favorite pics. or when i got back from studying abroad and put all my postcards in a hand-made marbelized italian journal and pressed dried flowers to frame my favorite pictures with.
so my thing is this. scrapbooking is just that. the 21st century version of eliot's shoring the fragments. it's the material version of the blog.
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