Why Choose Scrapbooking For a Hobby?

Scrapbooking is one of today's most popular hobbies or crafts. Why? Scrapbooks, whether paper or digital, are one of the best ways to preserve photographs and other memories of a person's life and family. While today's scrappers base their scrapbooks on photographs of special events in their lives or the lives of their family members, scrapbooks were being made long before the advent of photography.

So why choose scrapbooking for a hobby? The main reason to choose scrapbooking for a hobby is to provide a history of one's life and special events. While the popularity of scrapbooking has skyrocketed in the past several years, people have been keeping scrapbooks for many centuries. Scrapbook fans are essentially historians who keep and preserve the special events of their lives. So scrapbooking has been a historically important craft for a very long time.

People have been keeping some sort of scrapbook for hundreds of years. Starting in the 1400s, many recipes, letters, poems and other important pieces of paper were saved in albums. Early scrapbooking crafters collected their precious memorabilia and attached their memories to pieces of paper. These pieces of paper were later made into albums by combining the individual pages together.

Early scrappers saved bits of information on many of the same types of information that modern scrapbooking fans do. Renaissance era scrapbooking fans kept information on their favorite people, poems, pictures and trips. One of the rites of passage for a young person in those days was to take a European tour in their late teens or early twenties. Young, wealthy people who traveled through Europe collected colored plates with pictures of local coats of arms, famous places or famous events to put in their albums as souvenirs of their trips.

During the 1700s and 1800s scrapbooks were kept of school subjects and school friends. Girls kept a record of their writing skills, whether prose or poetry, in scrapbooks. They also kept scrapbook albums of their friends and school activities. While many young people kept journals of their personal history, keeping an album of pictures and other souvenirs was an important activity for many young people. Thus scrapbooking has been an important way for people to express themselves and keep their personal and family histories recorded through the ages.

When newspapers became available, newspaper clippings were added to scrapbooking albums as an important part of recording the important events in a person's life. The next advancement in scrapbook albums came when cameras and photographs became easily accessible to the public in the late 1880s. George Eastman's invention of the Kodak Brownie made photographs available to anyone who could afford to buy a camera. Thus, photographs began to be added to scrapbooks as pictorial records.

Today, scrapbooking is so popular most department stores carry huge assortments of scrapbooking supplies. And as history shows, you don't need to use only photographs for your scrapbooks, you can use any manner of things that mean something to you.

Visit Cheap & Easy Scrapbooking for more tips on scrapbooking on a tight budget.