Scrapbooking for dummies

I don't know how long ago it all began -- at least 10 years or so -- but a dear friend of mine got me interested in scrapbooking. It became a wonderful creative outlet. I would take a lot of pictures on trips that I made and then I would come home and write about the trips, inserting the pictures and basically creating magazines of my sojourns and other aspects of my daily life.

This friend conducted scrapbooking seminars and sold scrapbooking supplies and I took it all in. I quickly learned that scrapbooks made neat gifts. I put together books depicting vacations my son and I took together and gave it to him one year. To this day he keeps that book by his bedside. I also made one for a business partner because he and I went to a number of exotic locales.

My scrapbooking activities have diminished incredibly in recent years because (1) I needed to devote the amount of time I spent to craft these books to other activities and (2) my switch to digital photography meant most of my photographs went to the computer and not to paper. (And, yes, I have heard about "electronic" scrapbooks, but that idea holds no interest for me whatsoever, for the same reason I would never want electronic bookshelves to hold all of my electronic books.)

Regardless, I always thought of scrapbooking as a hobby, a creative diversion and fun, but certainly not something to wage war over. There are those who think differently, however -- those who think scrapbooking is close to a life and death situation. I discovered this alarming fact when I came across this story in the Los Angeles Times about Kristina Contes (pictured above). According to the story, she was once considered the Shakespeare of scrapbookers. Now she's considered the group's Clifford Irving.

Why? It seems she didn't personally photograph all the pictures that recently appeared in her latest prize-winning scrapbook (which shows how I out of this picture I've become -- I didn't even know they had prizes for scrapbooks). Oh, the horror! The horror!