Scrapbooking follows digital trend

CONCORD, N.H. — Wendy Armstrong won't confess how much money she used to spend on scrapbooking supplies, but she does admit nearly kicking her daughter out of her nursery to make more room for the piles of paper and decorative doodads.

The baby kept her room, but "believe me, it was a very hard decision," jokes Armstrong, a stay-at-home mom who lives near Portland, Ore. "This was not so much a scrapbooking hobby as a collecting hobby."

Two years later, Armstrong is ready to get rid of her collection altogether.

But she hasn't given up on scrapbooking. Rather, she's joining a growing number of scrapbookers who have gone digital.

Armstrong, 43, now creates all of her scrapbook pages entirely on her computer. No more physical cutting and pasting, no more agonizing over a layout to the point of paralysis.

"I had two kids, a backlog of a gazillion photos, and I was just getting to the point where I'd literally have layouts that sat on my desk for months just not quite finished," she said.

Switching to digital scrapbooking brought a huge sense of relief.

"All of a sudden, I didn't totally panic about finishing my layouts like I did with paper scrapping because I never really had to finish," said Armstrong, who has completed 240 pages in just more than a year. "It just created so much more freedom than paper scrapping."

Digital scrapbooking is a fast-growing offshoot of the $2.5 billion scrapbooking industry.

Motivated by the same desire to preserve memories as their traditional peers, digital scrapbookers use photo-editing software and other programs to arrange digital or scanned photographs, text and embellishments on their pages. Finished pages can be printed and inserted in standard scrapbook albums, bound in hardcover coffee table-style books, burned to CDs and DVDs or shared through e-mail.

Last winter, Armstrong created a batch of pages covering her family's activities of the previous year and printed two copies, one for herself and one for her parents in Florida.

"There's no way I would've done a paper scrapbook to send them," she said. "Heck, I couldn't even do it for myself."