Memory, scissors, paper

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

Scrapbooking

This is the scary word "scrapbooking" … The number of blogs dedicated to this absurd kind of female activity seems to be growing exponentially. And in terms of the number of diminutive suffixes, scrapbookers bypassed culinary sites. Their world, filled with buttons, postcards, ribbons, rhinestones, albums and bradsics (don't ask, I don't know what it is), can be joined by clicking on the "link on the side panel". Site panel on the Internet. Endless mimimi, turning into shushushu. Girls gather in real life and busily cut out something, glue it, knock with hole punches and staplers, in order to get a postcard or other useless thing in the household as a result. It’s kind of a magpie’s job to collect a lot of small shiny objects in one place.

Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking

In the pre-scrapbooking era, we had secrets. Do you remember, huh? A pair of beads, a flower petal and candy foil were placed in a hole, on top of all this was covered with a shard of glass and sprinkled with earth. If in the coveted place - provided that you manage to find it - wipe the window with your finger, then you could see this very secret under the glass. In fact, it was already impossible to discern anything, but the feeling of mystery still remained.

Scrapbooking seems to me to be the manufacture of secrets on an industrial scale, only no one is burying them anywhere.

Children's treasures are laid out on the net, they are exchanged and put up for competition. Not only that, there is also a drawing of "sweets". A candy (surprisingly not a candy) in the terminology of scrapbookers, or, as they call themselves, scrap-lady, is a set of the same buttons, beads and pieces of paper that can be used to decorate a postcard, frame and page in an album. Diminutive frenzy is slowly taking over my brain. I almost wrote "cerebellum". Eyes quietly climb on the forehead.

But what is scrapbooking? Initially, this is the making of a handmade family album. Memories and happy events of your own, maybe not the easiest and most joyful life, wrapped in a beautiful cover. The book by the founder of modern scrapbooking Marielene Christensen was called Keeping your memories alive - literally "Keep your memories alive" or "Memories revived" in Russian translation. Although the memories themselves are not so much living as materialized. You can touch them, smell them.

Every little thing in your life can be saved forever: a recipe for a wedding cake, a Paris subway ticket, a shell from your first trip to the sea, a child's drawing, a postcard from a fifth grade school friend.

In a sense, this is a female version of a demobilized album, with the only difference that demobilizing albums are built according to the same universal standard, good-looking and strong as a stool, and women's scrapbooks are an eternal search for individuality.

This is a story told not with words, but with the help of images that give rise to very personal associations. The very trendy New Visuality that makes up the main content of the Tumblr blog service. Instead of a dry photo report: a wedding, the birth of a child, his first birthday, the first day at school - a stream of dreams, rainbow pictures, where the event itself is decorated like a New Year tree with emotions, dreams of beauty and comfort.

Buttons, beads and dried flowers make up like a mosaic a picture of an ideal life, touching and sometimes funny. This is a secret that every woman has - the dream of happiness.

What remains of the past for us? A shoebox with receipts and a purchased album with indistinct photographs against the backdrop of a palm tree. Millions of boxes and millions of such albums are stored in cabinets on the far shelf. But suddenly it turned out that a hole punch, beads, a sheet of patterned paper and your own imagination make you and your family unique. Your life turns out to be amazing and unique, worthy to share memories of it with children. And their memories will be there too. And the memories of their children. And so on ad infinitum. Because you are family.

And diminutive suffixes are still unbearable.