Scrapbooking Revolutionary: A Creative Memories Consultant Shares Her Joys and Struggles with Scrapbooks

by Kristin Sawyer

Kristen Sawyer is a writer, teacher and traveler currently based in Costa Rica. She writes articles on sustainability for the ecolodge Rancho Margot, and weaves stories and essays together for other publications predominantly based Ecuador, including Cuenca Highlife, Cuenca Expat, and La Revista Zero. Her interests include capturing the world in pictures and words, living in harmony with nature, and hiking or biking whenever possible.

My mother, Kathy Sawyer, has always been a scrapbook lover. There are scrapbooks of her wedding to my dad, of the time before us three kids were born, and infinitely more albums to document the life and times of our family. We have albums for holidays. There are family albums to document a year chronologically. And when each of my two siblings and I turned 18, we received an album that was a chronicle. Bursting with photos and quotes and paper cut-outs, my family has many ongoing documentations of our lives. But my mom didn’t always use to make such colorful creations. Her style has changed through the years. Creative Memories was the turning point in her evolution as an artist of albums.

“This is my first Creative Memories album. Look, I have the little things (pieces of paper). Look! This is the birthday of my mom, she died the next year.” She points to a page with the invitation for her mom’s 70th birthday. “See, this is what’s sad, that we are getting away from the beauty of just being able to open a book and have these pictures there. Like look at these!”

And so begins an interview as my mom takes me through her world and experience of scrapbooking. It’s a story that I’ve never heard before in entirety, one that weaves between initial awe, then internal conflict, and finally resolution. My mom has always been creative, someone who can draw and collage and make beauty out of what’s around her. Scrapbooking was her way of putting photos somewhere, in a book where we could enjoy them. She was exposed to Creative Memories about 20 years ago, when we were living in Chicago.

She explains that first step into the crafting world, a party of a dozen women, friends and friends of friends. The majority of these women were probably stay-at-home moms, but most had worked in professional fields before taking care of their kids. “I’m invited to this party,” she begins. “I’d heard of Creative Memories before and been intrigued, thinking ‘Somebody has finally figured out the importance of designing a system around helping people to get these photos in albums.’”

My mom explains how there was possibility in this structure: albums, the tools, the workshop component. She’s always been someone who enjoys a good project, but ultimately loves the product.

Her friend told everyone to bring photos and they’d walk away with 1-2 pages designed for their album. My mom was intrigued by the concept, but also by the gadgets. “I had never heard of scissors that cut with waves or designs before…” It was a long day, 4 hours of cutting, talking, gluing, learning how to create art from the tools available, including the crafting scissors. And during that time, something interesting happened to my mom. She’s always been artistic, and she rarely compares herself to others, but when she was at the tables with other women making albums, she found herself getting comparative, almost competitive, as she looked around.

This was the initial seed of her conflict. The business model of Creative Memories was fantastic. She talked about how she completed her pages at that first party, only to find out those pages fit exactly into a Creative Memories album. And by that point the participants were so invested, they didn’t hesitate to buy the album. Another thing that impressed her were the pens. It’s the small things in life.

But along with the opening of this new freedom, there was a closing.

With that intention of crafting a new model for Creative Memories in mind, for herself and for the business, she contacted a consultant in Kansas City, where we had just moved. At this point, she hadn’t made a single scrapbook in about three years. But photos were still flipping through her mind, and her plans had been brewing.

“I contacted a Creative Memories person in Kansas City, where we’d just moved. I met with her and shared with her my frustration of what I’d observed…I said it’s my own personal reaction and I want to overcome it because I do want to start creating albums again.” My mom was referring to her moment of frustration, in that room where so many people had been meticulously planning, cutting, crafting their pages, spending hours, the comparative pressure had risen. My mom wanted to focus on the functional purpose as well as the beauty. Scrapbooking should be about the product and the process; there had to be a way to find common ground between the art of crafting an album and doing it in a way that honored time constraints and individual creativity. After talking to the representative, my mom made a choice, an investment.

My mom had become her own artistic, scrapbooking laboratory. She was crafting the formula of time + energy + creativity that worked for her, and would amount to a product of beauty and long lasting enjoyment. And during this time, she was also talking to her friends who similarly loved to scrapbook and exchanging ideas that inspired the albums she was drawn to make.

Even when she hadn’t been making albums for those couple of years, this idea had already been lodged in her head. She had been planning the albums she would one day make.

By the time that my mom was a Creative Memories Counsultant, she had saved up baggies of photos, organized by theme, to make the albums, and since she finally had the supplies—the books, page covers, pieces of paper, stickers, scissors—she was ready to craft.

The rest is history, stored on bookshelves in our back room. These albums are still an interactive part of our family. Though we don’t always sit around and look at them, they are there, ever-present, waiting to be opened and reveal lost memories. This act of taking time to appreciate photos is what my mom believes is missing from much of the digital instantaneity nowadays.

My mom’s sentiment is one felt by many. While we can share Google albums or Facebook albums or photos on Instagram, there is a tangible difference between clicking through photos rapidly online or going through them, in-person, as you get to hear the stories and experiences. Photos, and the albums that hold them, are more than just things.

“They often say if you were to have a fire in your house, what is the first thing you would take? For years I actually kept all the albums in the closet by the front door because I thought one of the first things I would take, other than the people, of course, would be the albums.”

I was happy to hear that. As we wrapped up the words of creative expression, I asked my mom if there was any advice she had for people just getting into the scrapbooking world. After she had achieved her own balance of beautiful pages, collaged photos, and Creative Memories tools, my mom had become a master at the equilibrium. For people just starting out, she says,

In this digitalized world, there are fewer and fewer people who take the time, the energy, to turn memories into photos, to turn photos into an album that will last for a lifetime. But it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. The album doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s better to have something than nothing. In a world where there are so many photos, where each person has tens of thousands, putting them into an album where people can share it together is one of the best ways to honor the experiences and the memories.