📚 What’s Scrapbook?
The Art of Scrapbooking: A Love Letter to Memory and Meaning
Long before digital feeds, before Stories disappeared in 24 hours and clouds stored our lives in invisible folders, we had (more) scrapbooks — humble, tactile, deeply personal collections of our lived experience.
Scrapbooking, in all its forms, is far more than cutting paper and gluing photos. It is an act of personal archiving. It is visual storytelling. It is history, emotion, and identity — stitched together with sentiment and scissors.
And like most beautiful things, scrapbooking has a much deeper history than you might think.
🕯️ Where Scrapbooking Comes From
To understand scrapbooking, we have to look to the past — to the long human tradition of capturing life in tangible form.
✍️ Commonplace Books & Friendship Albums
In 15th-century England, people kept commonplace books — curated collections of quotes, recipes, letters, poems, and notes. These books were a reflection of the owner’s interests and thoughts: part scrapbook, part journal, part encyclopedia of the self.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, friendship albums became fashionable — especially among young women. Think of them as early yearbooks or travel journals. Friends would inscribe notes, drawings, or quotes into each other’s albums. Travelers would gather coats of arms, portraits, and local art, binding them together as souvenirs of experience.
By the 18th century, the practice of extra-illustrating — also called grangerizing — emerged, where readers inserted clippings, illustrations, or engravings into published books, sometimes even dismantling and rebinding them to create personalized editions.
📖 Family Bibles as Scrapbooks
With the invention of the printing press, Bibles became more common. Families began recording their personal histories — births, deaths, weddings — on the blank pages of these sacred books. Over time, newspaper clippings, obituaries, and portraits joined the records, turning Bibles into early family scrapbooks.
This simple, devotional act of documenting lives passed down through generations — often by women — is a cornerstone of scrapbooking history.
📷 The Arrival of Photography & Modern Albums
The invention of the camera — and particularly Kodak’s Brownie in the early 1900s — changed everything. Suddenly, everyday people could capture everyday life. Family photo albums became more casual and reflective of real, messy, joyful moments.
By the mid-20th century, albums filled with photos, handwritten captions, ticket stubs, and pressed flowers became a household staple — a record of birthdays, vacations, and Sunday dinners.
But something was still missing: creative voice.
🧵 The Birth of Modern Scrapbooking
That came in 1980, thanks to Marielen Christensen — widely considered the mother of modern scrapbooking. At a genealogy event in Salt Lake City, she displayed 50 decorated albums filled with photos, journaling, and page protectors. It was revolutionary.
She didn’t just preserve memories. She elevated them — with art, with care, with intention. She made it beautiful. Accessible. Personal.
By 1981, she opened Keeping Memories Alive, the first scrapbook store in the U.S. A movement was born.
Scrapbooking shifted from archival to artful — a blend of storytelling, design, and emotional processing.
📦 Project Life, Planners & the Present Day
In 2008, Becky Higgins launched Project 365 — a photo-a-day kit that brought pocket-page scrapbooking into the mainstream (I love it so much). It simplified the process, welcomed beginners, and honored the beauty of everyday life.
Today, scrapbooking lives on in many forms:
Pocket-page albums like Project Life
Decorated daily planners with stickers, stamps, and story snippets
Bible journaling with art and words beside scripture
Junky journals that celebrate imperfection and process
Digital scrapbooks and hybrid formats that mix print and screen
From radical zines to heritage albums, the heart of scrapbooking remains the same:
To capture life with truth, creativity, and care.
💌 Why I Scrapbook
I began scrapbooking as a teenager — long before I had a name for it.
My first “scrapbook” was really a thick diary I treated like a sacred vault: notes from friends, magazine cutouts, Polaroids, handwritten poems, ticket stubs, lipstick marks, and dreams pressed between the pages.
It was chaotic, emotional, imperfect — and completely mine.
Now, decades later, I still scrapbook. But not just for nostalgia.
I do it to make meaning visible.
To turn moments into memory.
To preserve stories — mine, and those of others — with beauty and intention.
As an artist, I scrapbook with paper and ink.
As a woman, I scrapbook with heart.
As a memory keeper, I scrapbook because I believe nothing we love should be forgotten.
🛍 Want to Begin or Reignite Your Own Scrapbooking Practice?
Whether you’re new to memory-keeping or ready to return to it with fresh eyes and full heart, I’ve created tools to help you begin — or begin again — with intention.
✨ The Keepsake Studio
A soulful collection of hand-lettered, meaningful pieces designed to help you document, honour, and preserve what matters most — with beauty, purpose, and peace.
🎁 The Milestone Gift Map
A poetic, practical guide to help you transform life’s moments into meaningful gifts — whether it’s for yourself or someone you deeply care about.
These aren’t just products. They’re invitations to pause, reflect, and create a legacy of love and presence.
And of course, stay close here on BloGondo for more stories, tips, inspiration, and reflections on the slow, beautiful art of remembering. And check some of my projects.
🧡 Final Thoughts
Scrapbooking is an act of tenderness in a world that often rushes past the sacred.
Whether you do it with a kit, a binder, a messy old diary, or a digital folder, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you’re choosing to remember.
To notice.
To create.
To keep something that mattered.
And that, my friend, is art.
With love, gratitude and meaning,
Kellen Gondo
