Hold on to your hats, everyone, I’m about to talk about scrapbooking!

Ehh, who am I kidding, scrapbooking is not a terribly exciting topic. I mean, have you ever watched someone scrapbook? Of course you haven’t, because that’d be super boring. But let me tell you, for the scrapbooker, it is thrilling. No, that is not an exaggeration. I get really excited about choosing the perfect photos, determining how to place them on the page, deciding where to put my own commentary, and photo corners! Wonderful, wonderful photo corners…

Photo cornerssss!

Scrapbooking is great because it allows you to curate your memories for future perusing, kind of like a pensieve, but without the weird birdbath-looking thing. Or, you know, the magical bits.

When I was a wee middle school-aged lass, I kept all manner of ephermera and photos stuffed into a technicolor Lisa Frank dolphin binder, each page riddled with bubbly teenage handwriting and many, many exclamation points. When you’re 14 years old, everything is incredibly exciting!!!!!!!

Now that I’m twice that age, I only use like, three exclamation points. I reserve additional exclamation points for when I eventually meet Chris Cornell (!!!!), or when I finally win at a round of Connect Four (!!!!!). (Seriously though, I have never won a single game of Connect Four. I think I’m too easily tricked.)

But why bother printing pictures when you can just put them online and tag every single person involved?

I’ll tell you why. There’s something very special about being able to hold your photos and memories in your hands. It feels more permanent and official and real, somehow. And it’s always more personal to look through a physical album, with your own handwritten scrawls from days gone by, than to go clicking through a Facebook album (though that’s fun too). I go through my scrapbooks more often than I go through any digital albums.

I’m still creating a new album every year since I started scrapbooking again, and I swear that every year I get a little bit better at it, if it’s possible at all to become better at scrapbooking. (It is.) So four annual albums later (and the fifth still ongoing), I’ve picked up a few things that can make your foray (or return) into scrapbooking a fun experience. And here they are, my mighty pearls of wisdom:

• Scrapbooking can be as easy or complicated as you want it to be. After four years, I’ve decided to go the easy route. I just stick my choice photos to a page using self-adhesive photo corners and write a little note explaining what I had documented, along with the date. That’s it. Don’t make it so complicated that it becomes a chore.
• Scrapbook as close to when something happened as possible. It’s easiest to get energized to scrapbook right after you’ve done something exciting. You’re still riding the high of wanting to relive the experience, and scrapbooking will allow you to do just that. The longer you wait, the more the enthusiasm will fade and the less entertaining your own commentary will be.
• Be picky about what photos to print. Assuming you’re shooting with a digital camera or your phone, you’ll need to print your photos. This can get pricey pretty quickly, so be picky about which photos deserve to be preserved. Limit yourself to 7 photos per event, unless it was a huge deal, like if you were unexpectedly (or expectedly, I guess?) pulled into a time vortex and got to visit the Cretaceous Period.
• Get a nice album with plenty of space for writing. You don’t have to write a caption for every single photo, but it’s nice to have the option to put a little blurb here or there. And if you have a beautiful album, you’ll want to scrapbook more just so you can admire it and lovingly touch its cover and pages and… what, is that just me?
• Get an album that has expandable posts holding it together. Photos add a lot of bulk to pages, which can quickly lead them to go Full Furnace Bellows on you. To keep things looking nice and neat, get an album where the spine can grow along with the heft of your pages, like these from Kolo.

Now get to it!