Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Scrapbooking

It's all the rage. EVERYONE does it (OK, I don't. It requires patience and creativity I don't have.) It's new, it's exciting, it's...Victorian?

Another favorite pastime of both adults and children alike is the keeping of a scrapbook which is a collection of pictures on a subject of interest.

These scraps or "cutouts" can be printed in either black and white or in color, and either embossed or diecut. The collector fills his album with pictures grouped in themes, interspersed with personal notes, lines of poetry or dedications from family and friends.

Delighting in romanticism and sentimentality, popular scrapbook subjects include angels, children, birds, butterflies, pets, and fans. Also popular are military and naval themes as well as scraps depicting circus and seaside outings.

Victorians At LeisureThe Victorian Scrapbook

They scrapbooked cards, pictures from catalogs, Valentines, poems from admirers, sayings, anything they wanted to keep and remember. Sound familiar? OK, so they didn't invent them, but they did popularize them. Early scrap albums were looked upon as an extension of the diary and likewise used for the recording of personal mementoes and thoughts.

2 comments:

Susan Macatee said...

Of course they didn't have the distractions of television, movies, the internet and video games that we do today.

I would imagine that lacking our entertainments, Victorians had plenty of time for scrapbooking, just as they did for letter writing and journaling.

Kristin-Marie said...

I suppose a scrapbook was for public consumption, while the journal was kept private.