Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking as an artform appears to be gaining greater interest here in Metro Manila. There are now more scrapbooking materials available at National Bookstore branches and stores like Memory Box (at the fourth floor of Robinsons Galleria) and SMILE (at the upper ground level of SM Megamall, Building A), near Toy Kingdom.

Judging from the pricing, particularly at the very specialized stores, scrapbooking appears to be the hobby of those with funds to spare. First, they're the ones with the time and second, they would have the money to take lots of photos, buy lots of materials, and have occasions for chronicling.

When we only had one child in the family, there was more time and more funds to go around. Adi, therefore had lots of photo albums cum scrapbooks. Even his turning a month older was recorded and embellished with various cut-outs, stickers, and what have you. Ali, our second child, has her birth albums/scrapbook, her first birthday, and everything else is shared. Scrapbook type of albums are now reserved for our yearly vacations, 7th birthdays, and for the rest, we have the slip-on type of albums but still with some space (at the side), to hand-write our comments and captions.

Still, for the rare times that I now take effort to put something together, I rarely spend a fortune on scrapbooking materials. I make use of old travel magazines (well, the glossy ones here are kind of pricey too) -- where I cut out cute phrases or letters to spell out the caption for a particular picture. We also fill our travel albums with tickets from the trip, brochure cut-outs, not to mention drawings, writings and songs personally made by family members. Greeting cards, stickers, and gift tags also make our albums cum scrapbook look more interesting.

So, set aside some time to preserve those memories today. Time may be scarce, materials pricey -- but memorable times with family are priceless and worth looking back to and remembering with flair.