Journaling. Use it.

There have been a lot of good posts in the baseball card blog community lately about the state of the hobby, what got us collecting in the first place, and what got us back into the hobby. (I don’t think it would be so far off the mark to say that most of us are men in our thirties who started collecting when we were between six and ten and we’re all feeling nostalgic now; substitute “man” for “woman” and you’ve got me exactly.) These posts got me thinking about why I stopped collecting in the first place, and it turned into a long rambling post about my relationship with my mother that’s a bit too raw and emotional for me to post right now. In short: Baseball was something for us to share, and once we really couldn’t, it wasn’t something I wanted to get involved with.

This then got me thinking about the other subject of this blog (the one I don’t talk about that much,) scrapbooking. There’s been this controversy in the hobby lately that shows the divide between two camps of scrapbookers: the collage art people (mostly young women) and the…well, let’s just say “moms with lots of pictures of their kids.” I’m halfway in between. As I’ve said before, I’m single and don’t have any children. I love the style of the personal art scrappers but so much of it ends up saying so little about the context of the photo. That’s also a problem with the family scrapbook. I discovered this inadvertently many years ago when looking through my mother’s scrapbooks from high school. There were lots and lots of pictures of people I didn’t know with only dates noted. Only until I asked her did I find out what the pictures were; she had gone on vacations with her best friend and their mutual mentor (their high school’s library director) and her parents. So much would have been lost if I hadn’t asked–and what if I had been unable to ask?

I’ve had to do extra research in planning for my journaling on layouts from pictures I’ve taken long ago. Thank goodness for the Internet, which allows me to look up the exact dates of the gaming convention I volunteered at in 1997 or the date and boxscore (thank you, Retrosheet) of the Brewers/Yankees game from which I have a half-completed scorecard and about 10 pictures of Alvaro Espinoza taking BP. It’s making putting things in context for some scrapbooks much, much easier.

Be as avant-garde or traditional as you’d like but for crying out loud, please include journaling or your descendants or your future girlfriend or whoever are not going to know what the heck your layout is about! (or even if that’s you in that layout. esp. if it’s just your eye or something.)

(as for the controversy, the problem with large groups of women–both sides need to stop violating Snacky’s Law, which is such, such an illustration of the traps and pitfalls of female socialization, but that’s an entirely different post and it’s way beyond the scope of a ballcard blog)

Paper 30, Me 0

I went to Archiver’s today to use the free cardstock coupon and ended up getting an entire pile of paper as well. It’s paper I don’t really need, but I am so addicted to Heidi Grace Designs paper that when I saw a bunch of it on clearance I had to get as much as possible. I learnt this the hard way after running out of the Woodland paper when doing a vacation scrapbook (which I will eventually post here when I get the darn journaling done. ha ha ha)

I have to agree with a friend of mine re scrapbooking and the lack of paper having to do with her interests. I love the Heidi Grace stuff because it’s such an organic, curved sort of design. I also buy a lot of paper with spiral motifs for the same reason. There really isn’t that much out there that interests me. I’m not particularly into the distressed and worn look, or I’d be buying a lot more Basic Grey paper than I do. Everything else is too cutesy or intended for the wife and mother sort of scrapbooker, not the thirtysomething unmarried (if not necessarily unpartnered) childfree scrapbooker. Especially, if like me and my friends, she’s fannish or goth or some other sort of subculture. We’d like to scrap too, but it looks like some sort of cult from the outside. ;)