Examining the True Rules of Scrapbooking

Each Monday, I discuss my Scrap Happy project based on Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.

Last week, I kicked off October’s theme, pay attention.

Today’s topic is examining true rules. What are the rules of scrapbooking? There is a lot of debate over what the rules of scrapbooking may or may not be. When asked, I tell new scrapbookers to:

• Avoid rubber cement. It will warp your page protectors and unless you are using photos that are backed up, you will destroy your photos.
• When selecting an album, you get what you pay for. I believe this completely. I have paid a lot of money on albums and I have went cheap. The quality differences is huge.
• There is no wrong way to scrapbook. You can scrapbook anything you want, however you want. Don’t get hung up on a right or wrong way.

Other than those three things, I’m not really sure what the “rules” of scrapbooking are. I think there are a lot of ideas about the rules and some will take issue with me even using the word rules. What we are really talking about are norms. What rules do you tell new scrapbookers?

So what are my personal scrapbooking rules?

I don’t talk about being behind or getting caught up. I don’t ever want to be caught up because it means I have nothing left to scrapbook. I do enjoy finishing a project, but then I usually start more projects. Some of my albums are all “caught up” and others are very much “behind.” And I’m just fine with that.

I scrapbook the everyday and events. I find value in doing both. I know scrapbookers who have done this for any length of time often get bored by “one more birthday or Christmas” layout. I don’t. I want to record my family’s traditions in addition to the everyday. I don’t scrapbook every birthday, nor do I scrapbook every holiday. I just don’t get too hung up on it. I don’t let myself feel obligated to scrapbook events, and I don’t let myself feel lame for scrapbooking events.

I like my albums organized chronologically. I like all my layouts about 2009 in an album for 2009. I like being able to quickly find a layout if need be and I can do that if they are chronological. I do not scrapbook in chronological order, I just organize my layouts in chronological order. (Un)fortunately, people are not clamoring to look at my albums, so I can keep a stack of finished layouts in a pile until I get enough layouts covering a certain length of time to add them to an album.

What are your scrapbooking rules? Comment below or join the conversation on facebook or twitter.

If you want to read more about Scrap Happy project based on Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun or my Scrap Happy Project, check out the other posts in the Scrap Happy series.