Let's hear it for the scrapbook.

This "Monday" post started with a poem, a familiar one to many of us. I found it by accident at Scrapbooking.com:

Monday's Child (Nursery Rhyme)

Author: Unknown

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child must work for a living,
But the child that's born on the Sabbath day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay.
Scrapbooks come in millions of creative forms. I have many scrapbooks, though I do not see myself as a regular scrapbooker. My daughter is the real scrapbooker. She understands the universe of tools and techniques offered by the artform. She facilitates an annual weekend retreat devoted to scrapbooking. We, her family are the beneficiaries of her beautiful and creative announcements, gift tags, decorated photos, etc. And her almost grown-up kids have the benefit of many lovely scrapbook chronicles of their growing up years.

What a wonderful form of personal expression the scrapbook presents! My mother and grandmother kept all kinds of scrapbooks. My own scrapbooks began in high school with inexpensive 11" x 14" newsprint books of blank pages, into which I pasted the things I wanted to save. I still have them six decades later. I kept movie ticket stubs, dance cards, football game programs, concert programs, birthday party invitations, and (now dried) flower corsages from boys. Since the scrapbooks were for all to see, my love letters were kept elsewhere. Over the years I made and kept scrapbooks in other forms: snapshots and photographs, newspaper clippings, favorite movie star photos (I still mourn because those got lost), clipped recipes and one for birth and graduation announcements along with obituary clippings.

The scrapbooking hobby is so popular that the DIY Network devotes a great website and entire TV series to the subject. Scrapbooking for men revealed that Mark Twain was a scrapbooker. The practical purpose of a scrapbook is to collect the "stuff" you want to keep for future reference. Memories, documentation, how-to instructions, interesting trivia, enriching imagery, etc., are all collected and treasured by us. I still feel a twinge of sadness as I page through a scrapbook I purchased at an antique shop. It was made before World War II by a Midwestern woman who kept the same kinds of things I have kept. What made me sad is that the scrapbook landed in a shop, unclaimed by her descendants, for sale to the public. I almost felt as if I were "peeking" where I did not belong, as I looked at her personal collection of treasures. I have, however, attempted to honor her memory by turning those pages in a (Zen) "mindful" way.

Scrap-booking can be a very cheap or a very expensive hobby. If you are addicted, it can become the vehicle for a way of life. One can imagine that an inveterate scrapbooker would visit this very rich Scrapbook.com website often. The website, naturally has a "Superstore -- Fun Fast & Really BIG," "Forums -- Talk With Scrapbookers," and a "Gallery -- View and Share Layouts Etc.," But it also has sections labeled, "Library -- Thousands of Resources," "Blogs -- Online Scrapbook Journals," "University -- Learn From the Best," and "My Place -- Your Own Free Custom Site."

In a way, blogs and personal websites are electronic forms of the scrapbook. We find things we want to keep and share that we post/paste on to a page. With both scrapbooks and web sites, we choose our theme and colors carefully, we pay attention to white space, to composition, to flow, and to style. We "decorate" the pages to be pleasing to our own eyes, and hope that others will enjoy them, also. The best pages are those that have the benefit of a creative mind, a steady hand, an artist's eye, a writer's sensibility, and an open heart.

My scrap-blogs: Cross-posted at Southwest Blogger. My topical post today at South by Southwest and The Reaction is about politics in the Southwest. Ten of us have a social network website that is called "scrap paper." You are welcome to join us.
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