Scrapbooking is here to stay

It's Saturday morning, and many women begin a day-long process of gathering photos, paper and embellishments for a scrapbooking get-together called "the crop."

Meanwhile, Whitney Ramboz will spend five minutes preparing by grabbing her laptop and external hard drive before walking out the door. At the crop, six to 12 women, including Ramboz, preferring to abandon the mounds of supplies and mess, will set up their laptops for some digital scrapbooking.

"With digital, I can change paper digitally to any color or any size and use kits over and over again," Ramboz said. "If you have a picture you’re trying to match colors to, you can immediately match a color using PhotoShop Elements."

With digital scrapbooking becoming more popular, some will wonder whether traditional paper-and-glue scrapbooking will retire at the same time as the baby boomers. Advances in digital software and a popular do-it-yourself, paper-cutting machine, combined with the continued love of scrapbooking, give the hobby in all its forms a reason to stay.

According to a study published by the Craft and Hobby Association, scrapbooking and its associated supplies brought in $3.34 billion in revenue last year. The report predicted that over the next year, while spending in more traditional scrapbooking supplies is expected to drop, spending on digital supplies is projected to increase by 36 percent.

Rather than expiring to the morgue of temporary fads, picture sharing and preservation — the essence of scrapbooking — has evolved into many forms. These include traditional paper-and-glue pages or digital story books that are printed and bound professionally. Or if one prefers an easier-to-share medium, there are digital books, blogs and even Facebook.

"Facebook is a way of sharing photos and that is what scrapbooking is," says Angela Ahn, a marketing and trade show manager for Die Cuts With A View, a paper manufacturing company whose products are often used for scrapbooking. "In that sense, Facebook has taken that aspect of scrapboooking and made it super easy to do."

Companies that formerly offered only traditional scrapbooking supplies like Creative Memories and DCWV have adapted to the expanding forms of scrapbooking in the past few years by offering digitized versions of their products. Last year, DCVW released an eScrap App where users can quickly scrapbook their photos to use as backgrounds on their phones or to share on the Web.

People enjoy reliving their memories in the process of preserving them, said Debbie Preece, a Creative Memories consultant of eight years. They enjoy the social camaraderie while attending crops.