International Scrapbooking Day

International Scrapbooking Day is held annually on the 4th March and US National Scrapbooking Day is the first Saturday in May. There seems to be some confusion on the web between the two but either way Spring is clearly the perfect time to start that scrapbook or memory book! Do you have a mountain of photos in the bottom of a wardrobe? A shoe box full of letters? Pictures of your kids, grandparents or their grandparents? Wouldn't it be nice to put all these lovely memories together in a memory book or scrapbook?

The picture is from my on-line scrapbook of my life in Limousin, South West France. Together with my other articles, it tells a tiny bit of the story of how we came to France, found our house, our animals, created our B&B and holiday cottage and started running our painting holidays.

Before we had even thought of emigrating, my mother made a gorgeous album for my son, starting with the hospital scan of him before he was even born and going up until he was about five years old. Lots of photographs and bits and bobs. So many wonderful memories. He still loves leafing through the story of his childhood even though he's a teenager now.

A scrapbook is something that brings together the past for people in the present. Something to safeguard your family history and your own story for the future and something to pass down through your family. A scrapbook is a personal history and something to be treasured, so any time between the 4th March or the first Saturday in May is the perfect time to start the scrapbook of your life and to make the most of Scrapbooking days.

Oh - and did I mention Digital Scrapbooking Day? The first Saturday in November.

This is a comprehensive resource book covering the basics as well as more advanced techniques. It is generously illustrated showing you exactly what to do.

This book not only covers traditional scapbook techniques, but also looks at photography, journaling and digital scrapbooking. For more on all of these scrapbooking techniques, read on.

It all began in 1994

National Scrapbook Day was started in 1994 by the album company Creative Memories - so just who are Creative Memories, and what do they do?

This Scrapbook enterprise began in 1987 when Mom, Rhonda Anderson, was talking to a mothers' group about her family albums. Rhonda found that the other women had not collected together the family pictures and memorabilia in any meaningful form. ("Stuffed into drawers" was how she described it.)

Being the sort of person to sort a problem out, she called Cheryl Lightle at a Minnesota-based album manufacturer and asked for FORTY albums. Well, the two women got together and the rest is history!

Creative Memories are a home-based business with consultants who offer their expertise and various albums in which to record your life, ideas and memories. Their photo albums, scrapbook albums and photo books are great starting points for your scrapbook or memory book.

There have been some rather famous scrapbookers!

Did you know that Queen Victoria, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and Paris Hilton all enjoy scrapbooking? Thought not. This was only one of the fascinating scrapbooking facts laid bare by Woman's Hour in this article about creating and keeping a scrapbook. Jackie Payne and by digital scrapbooker Suzy Beecher. Well, apart from these celebs mentioned above, it's mostly women who keep scrapbooks. No surprise really. It's women who keep the family together, women who organise social life, women who keep in touch with friends and women who document family life.

This is an image that I made for my online scrapbook of Limousin

Tune into Woman's Hour and listen to traditional scrapbooker Jackie Payne and digital scrapper Suzy Beecher talking about scrapbooking.

There's nothing like a book! My son still gets our or photo albums and looks at the pictures we collected of his life, even though he's fourteen now. Pity I didn't know about scrapbooking then. There's so much that has been lost or gone unrecorded.

What a fabulous gift a scapbook of your life would make, and perfect for grandparents to put together for grandchildren. There are so many gorgeous papers, decorations, pictures an ideas to help you really bring the book to life. All you need is the album, a pair of scissors and a little glue. But you can go much, much further!

Image: This is one of the images that I created as part of my experiments with backgrounds. The hay and oak leaves are very much a part of our lives in the French countryside and I thought images or text could be added on top of these backgrounds. I could have bought hand made vegetable papers and glued on the leaves, but instead I scanned it hay and oak leaves from the garden. The choice is yours.

The First Saturday in November

Digital Scrapbooking Day, Scrapbooking by computer, takes place on the first Saturday in November. It was designated Digital Scrapbooking Day by the company Triscape, Inc. in 2007 to encourage the use of online and comuter-based tools for scrapbooking.

Is digi scrap a cheaper option?

Digital scrapbooking, (sometimes called digi scrap or digiscrap), might be cheaper, though, to use your computer to put your pages together, (as I did). Instead of buying all the paper and decorations, you buy just one dedicated programme.

If you are just a bit computer savvy, you can produce your pages digitally. There are programmes with all the goodies loaded up and all you have to do is scan your material and drag images, patterns and decorations onto your virtual page.

Print it out and put it into your album. Best of both worlds.

Image: Honesty that I scanned into the computer to use in my online scrapbooking.

You might enjoy all that paste and scraps of paper, but if not, digi scrapping might just be for you. Clean and easy, no clipping or sticking, you make your pages on your computer. No clearing up afterwards either!

Genealogy has fueled interest in scrapbooking

Have you seen the TV programme 'Who do you think you are'? Fascinating. Well known people find out about their ancestors. I'd love to find out more about mine.

Everyone these days, it seems, are trying to find out about their long-lost relative and their distant family history. All this delving into the past creates a wealth of old photos and tons of interesting material, so doesn't it make sense to put all this together in a scrapbook?

Squidoo is my online scrapbook

I use Squidoo and HubPages to tell the world about my life in France, but really, I get carried away by all the fantastic things there are out there - like Scrapbooking!

I'll write about holidays in Limousin, (and I should be doing this to help promote Les Trois Chenes, our guest house and gite), but then I'll see fabulous heart shaped glasses, notice frost on grass, fall in love with bulbs in the home or get carried away by chocolate or International Kiss Day. My articles are my scrapbook and I just love leafing through them to see all the things that have taken my fancy over the last couple of years.

Your scrapbook is going to be an important document - it contains your life memories and the life memories of your loved ones - so it's worth investing in the best. You will almost certainly want to add more information than will fit into one book, so think of your first scrapbook as the first of many. Choose something that suit's your taste and ideas.