Uncommon Scrapbooking Ideas
For a friend who had been actively doing scrapbooking for the past two years and is obsessed about the craft enough to have even attended trade shows and sold the customary scrapbook or two on online auction sites, there came a point when scrapbooking became an all too boring and predictable routine. The once and future self-proclaimed Empress of scrapbooking ideas suddenly discovered much to her dismay that she had run out of ideas.
It is like lifting weights and building muscles, a friend of ours who is active in weight training advised her. At some point, you are just doing everything repetitively without knowing it and your muscles become bored. When muscles are bored, they stop growing. In the same way, your scrapbooking ideas have peaked. There is after all, so much you can do with ribbons, glue-guns and acid-free paper.
While the analogy seemed funny in tone, the concept was right on the money. The problem with scrapbooking ideas is that they revolve around in an industry more concerned with the commercial aspect of scrapbooking rather than the artistic part of the hobby. Try researching online; buying a scrapbooking book or magazine and you would see variations of actually similar scrapbooking ideas. The recycling of such ideas in scrapbooking comes to a point where truly artistic hobbyists find themselves peaking and unable to generate fresh work or original creations.
Sometimes the best way to get out of this rut is to simply shun the normal channels or sources where one gets scrapbooking ideas. One hobbyist who actually has an extensive art and graphic design background had a similar problem and was brave and innovative enough to take on uncommon scrapbooking ideas that were nothing short of being quite radical. She completely stopped looking at sites and resources on the internet did not buy any new books or magazines about scrapbooking and even went as far as to delete all her old scrapbooking ideas. She burned her bridges and built new ones across the art she once thought, was not compatible with the hobby she felt so passionate about. Part of the restriction that comes with scrapbooking comes from the perception that it is the kind of craft that only bored mothers and silly teenagers indulge in. This perception prevents people from appreciating the history of scrapbooking as an old form of record-keeping and one that has since time immemorial, been distinctive for having always had decorative elements. So to generate fresh and uncommon scrapbooking ideas, one should find fresh and uncommon sources. That friend went back to art school, to museums and old paper factories. She unearthed and used art techniques that were never done on scrapbooks. She threw off the mind-set that scrapbooks have to maintain some form or shape. Scrapbooking is also art, she emphasized, and like art, there shouldn't be any limit to how we express it. And expressing it and finding novel scrapbooking ideas meant searching beyond the ordinary. She went back in time to find papyrus making techniques by the Egyptians and made organic, natural paper. She studied fresco painting and began to use unconventional paints and dyes. She used different materials for covers and decorations, even using exotic snake skin and fur. The whole exercise of finding uncommon scrapbooking ideas not only gave her fresh work, but also invigorated her mind and outlook on life.
Scrapbooking
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