There are those of us with shoeboxes of family pictures and lots of good intentions.
Then there are people like Julie Lawson and her mother, Carol Cluff. Veterans of the "scrapbooking" craze, they can whip out any number of artistic, organized binders packed with safely preserved family memories."It gives me an out," Lawson said. "It's a social thing, but it also feels productive because I'm accomplishing this for my family."
Lawson of Stansbury Park in Tooele County is a full-time homemaker and mother of two who does bookkeeping for her husband's dental practice.
Finding time for the hobby is tough, but she said she relishes her twice monthly evening workshops with friends and a monthly mother-daughter lunch/scrapbooking session that often includes other relatives.
She estimates she spends $30 to $50 per month documenting the lives of her family, which includes husband Shannon, daughter Summer, 8, and son Spencer, 3.
Her husband doesn't mind. After he pored over many of the scrapbooks with the kids one day when mom was gone, Shannon Lawson was impressed. "He said 'I don't care how much it costs -- it's worth every penny.' He saw the joy of preserving those memories," Julie Lawson said.
It always is clear when a hobby has arrived: it switches from being a noun to a verb. "Scrapbooking" has swept the nation and shows no signs of slowing. Utahns with their penchant for journals and family history have embraced the trend with gusto.
Consider these facts:
The Hobby Industry Association calls it the number one hobby in America.
The association estimates sales of scrapbooks and related items totaled more than $250 million in 1998.
Just this month, the Orem-based Creating Keepsakes Scrapbook Magazine was featured in a full-page color ad in People Magazine and often is seen on the QVC home shopping channel.
The Orem-based magazine has played a big part in spreading the "scrapbooking" message. Begun in 1996 by business partners Lisa Bearnson and Don Lambson, the publication initially was a 68-page bi-monthly magazine with a printing of 40,000 copies.
Today, it features 180 full-color pages and boasts a reading audience of 500,000. It is available at Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart. Its Web site www.creatingkeepsakes.com also offers information on the nearest scrapbook stores in a given area in the nation through a national database.
Don Lambson thinks part of the appeal of scrapbooking is the creativity it offers people and the permanency of the end result. "It's the one thing you can work on that doesn't get undone. I don't think there's a more rewarding hobby in the world," he said, noting that people can make beds and wash dishes all day, but this immortalizes one's family.
"Nobody else can do this for you," adds Lisa Bearnson. "There's also no wrong way to do it, except using the wrong materials. Someone can say, 'I'm not going to be criticized for how I do it.' "
Nostalgia also looms large in this endeavor. It's fun to watch the kids on a video, but there's nothing like a handsomely bound, well-prepared scrapbook that includes journal entries to capture a season, a birthday or a graduation. Theme scrapbooks for weddings, new babies and other milestones are hugely popular.
Bearnson reveals yet another reason why the hobby is so hot: "It's addictive. You create one page and you want to create another. You want everything. People don't stop at the basics."
They certainly don't need to given the plethora of products found not only in specialty stores, but in gift shops, card shops, stationery stores, fabric stores, art supply houses, grocery stores and major discount retailers.
Forget the old pinking shears routine. There are special scissors that create scalloped edges for picture borders. Or ragged edges. Or wave-shaped edges. Or soft zig-zag edges.
There are acid-free papers, die-cuts, pens and stickers. There are decals and shapes and theme-making images that can either be used on their own or recreated.
Carol Cluff of Tooele, who is Julie Lawson's mom, has been doing this for more than 30 years -- well before acid-free paper and specialty stamps came on the scene.
Once these products were available, she painstakingly re-did all the family photo albums so they could be preserved safely. "I also wanted the children to be able to look at them hour after hour," Cluff said.
She has done eight binders for each of her six children, including adding new sections for grown-up and married life for the older children.
Cluff also enjoys creating specialty binders, including one for her parents' 50th wedding anniversary, family reunions, a Christmas memories book for the entire family, Utah's centennial and sesquicentennial celebrations and her sons' missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
"It seems like every year I take on something different or new," Cluff said.
It's a great way to preserve family history, and the scrapbooks provide endless pleasure for the whole family, she said. "My children like to show these books to their children."