Reflections on Two Decades of Digiscrapping.

You know when you have a clean up or clean out, you can stumble on random things that make you reminisce and reflect?

Well, this post is brought to you in part courtesy of an old Encyclopaedia of Scrapbooking I forgot I had from way back when I was still learning about all things paper scrappy. I thought International Scrapbooking Day weekend was as good a time to share this as ever. Because of copyright, obviously I can’t share any imagery from that hefty tome (and I donated it to a secondhand book place recently after aforementioned clean out), but let’s just say the example layouts were very dated and gave me flashbacks and second-hand embarrassment (especially when I looked up tags for the last Never Out of Style blog post – like what was with the weird cluster of ribbons and eyelash wool all bundled to put through eyelets on tags not actually tied to the page?!). So obviously things have changed, i just didn’t really realise how far we’d come in 20yrs until I flipped through that book. Chatting with some of the Pollys, today’s post shares their collective reflections, experiences and some pearls of wisdom.

I’ve added some photos of my ‘back then’ real paper scrapping pages too. If this were a movie, I’d be playing that wavy dream like flashback effect and music intermittently through the following. (Please don’t comment on my lack of credits – I didn’t track them back then, (I know: gasp, shock horror). These pages haven’t seen the light of day in easily a decade and I can’t remember what products I used over 20years ago. I can’t even remember what I went looking for in a kitchen drawer by the time I’ve walked over to it these days).

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, take me back to the year two thousand and four….. ” This is my first flashback, and while I still love tags (have you seen the March Never Out of Style: Tags & Labels blog post?! ), see what I mean about eyelash wool? this one was pretty tame because it was all one colour and I skipped the eyelet setter. I remember agonising over perfectly straight cut lines, placement when gluing and not ‘wasting’ precious papers. Did other paper scrappers have the same inner Gollum/Smeagol this supplies?!

Pride and embarrassment – Looking back on the start of our scrapping and what we used: As paper scrappers, we were enamoured with stickers, rub-on transfers, patterned papers and die-cuts, and cropped a lot of photos into interesting shapes with fancy-edge scissors and punches and added ephemera like tickets…. with anxiety about commitment and glue! And although some of us may cringe to look back on some of those paper pages (mortified at my oval cropped wedding photo pages!), a lot of those components are still used in our contemporary digi pages but maybe not in quite the same way (none of the Pollys mentioned missing their fancy edged scissor effects funnily enough).

I loved that nested shape ,reusable cropping stencil for different sized ovals and my corner rounder. I used a corner rounding action with digital Project Mouse pocket cards still a few years back but these doodled hearts and logos were as mixed media as I got back in the early 2000’s with paper layouts. Paint wasn’t allowed anywhere near my pretty clean paper stash.

But pride and an overwhelming sense of gratitude at their younger selves for starting to preserve those moments and memories is what came through from the Pollys as well. (Some of them even have others at home or in real life to enjoy looking at these precious time capsules with!) And more so, the journalling and time to have added notes to photos to preserve at least the who, what, why and when that a photo may not convey or that we may forget at some point. So while the stickers and the styles may date the page, it is the memories scrapped in the first place that still matter and the journalling can shape our feelings about older pages. Note to self: journal more. What do you feel when you look at your older pages?

Stripes (and polka dots) are still timeless to me (and might be a Nedever Out of Style in the future) so that makes this page a slightly less cringey, but the font choice (mixed up for interest in the journal box and layering like it was double stamped for the title!) and the homemade elements are not my cup of tea now. The gold brocade though still feels ritzy and i’d use that in scrapping today!

Paper to digi – Turning points: Most of the Pollys started scrapping with paper (some as young as 12y.o. collecting memories in a journal and adding stickers for example) but the consensus was they wouldn’t have continued to scrap or be as productive or continue to enjoy it as much without going digital.

Maintaining a hobby for 20 years is pretty significant and many of us have scrapped for well over a decade. Finding digiscrapping though was really a turning point for many of us, leaving the ‘paper world’ behind. We discussed why was it such a turning point and I’m guessing if you’re reading this you are also a digiscrapper and you can guess their responses (if not, let me list some reasons).

• Less setup involved for a scrap session plus less mess to clean up
  • means more actual creative time. Some of the Pollys are super fast but there’s no way I could do a speed scrap with paper. My flashback pages often took me days (plural) of scraptime!
  • means less potential danger or issues with toddlers (or pets) around
• Less potential ‘wastage’ of supplies with no real off-cuts or ‘whoops – ruined that’ issues.
  • Digital ink or paint for mixed media work doesn’t dry up/ There’s no danger of cutting up a piece of paper ‘wrong’ or gluing it in the wrong place
• Less physical storage space required
  • The amount of ‘papers’ you can fit on a USB stick drive compared to an actual cupboard… ok, yes you might need multiple EHDs and devices and maybe a Silhouette/Cricut over the years but still feels more minimal because you couldn’t store a real 12×12 paper pad in The Cloud!
• More choice and personalisation ability
  • You don’t need to invest in every colour of ink, cardstock or marker etc. Recolouring designer products is pretty easy
• Easier access to products
  • instant downloads and no need to visit a bricks and mortar store that potentially doesn’t carry your preferred product or wait for shipping, if the physical store still exists
• The freedom to create and try new styles or trends with less risk and investment
  • which is huge. The ‘undo’ function is a big safety net that takes the anxiety and ‘error’ out of trial and error.
  • that may have influencced the evolution of photoless and art journalling styles since they weren’t really a thing in The Beginning .

This is around the time I became an accidental hybrid-er. I gradient filled text to make titles for my paper pages, printed journalling because handwriting that much text was just fathomable and printed clipart ghosts and fussy cut those gold photo corners from who knows where on the internet. No wonder I embraced the ability to cut and paste digitally – gotta love the dark patches of glue around those torn fibrey paper clouds (or whatever younger me was doing there). Trying to balance the ‘blocky’ look of photos, and especially using 1 portrait and 1 landscape orientation photo, is still tricky to me these days. Maybe some things we never really get better at or comfortable with?

Must keep scrapping – The driving factors: As someone that is always seeking to understand why, I was interested in what the team thought were the reasons they continued to scrap when there are so many hobbies out there to compete for our time.

The survey says we are all either driven by the need to preserve memories (as storytellers or photographers) or the need to be creative and process feelings in a creative way (as artists and art journallers), or some combination of those. The connectedness of the digiscrapping community and ability to share our pages with like-minded others seems to definitely have kept the Pollys scrapping and sharing. What drives your continued scrapping?

Thanks to the Pollys for being dragged back down memory lane & feel free to share your flashbacks, embarrassing or otherwise, in the comments and I hope you’re having a great scrappy NSD weekend!