Oct 1, 2007

Feels So Good to Be So Bad...

I have been working on a book at Heritage Makers. As I slapped a piece of digital scotch tape over a photo, I realized how fun it is to be so naughty! I remember watching a segment of THE VIEW last October where Rosie O'Donnell was "scrapping" with these women who were saying it was okay to use masking tape and paint all over your photos. It was downright frightening. But, with digital scrapping, you can tape, staple and paint with abandon. It breaks all the rules that we have spent the last 15 years setting on the traditional side of the industry.

Recently, an expert on preservation spoke about scrapbooks at an event in Utah. She said she doesn't care for the new methods of scrapbooking and feels like the books won't last. She advocates holding your scrapbooks with white cotton gloves. That's taking things a bit too far, IMO. Can you see me asking everyone to put on little gloves before they can touch my albums?

I'm not even that hung up about acid-free. My mom made me books when I was small using all sorts of acidic products and nearly 40 years later, they as still hanging in there. I have no problem slapping a concert program or a picture from a magazine on my page. I might not stick it over my photo, but I will certainly put it on my page. I figure that past my grandkids, no one will care about my books. They'll rip out the photos they want and toss the rest.

But you can really be naughty with digi scrapping! It's fun to slap a digital staple in the middle of a photo to attach a piece of digital ribbon. I don't even think twice about it as I might with traditional scrapping.

Feels so good to be so bad...

1 comment:

Sandra @ The Memory Workshop said...

I 'rescued' all my grandmother's photos from acidic albums where she'd often scotch-taped them in overlapping each other, cropped them with kitchen shears, wrote on *the fronts* with ball point pen...

And I while I'm happy that they are safer now in "safe" scrapbook, those crooked edges and remnants of tape and shaky handwriting just scream "Nana" and give them charm and personality you just don't see in todays sophistocated scrapbooking.

Most people would be horrified by how unsafely her photos were stored, yet some are close to 100 years old and they survived dust, little kids' grimy fingers, extreme heat & cold, humidity, and complete ignorance of the "acid free" rule. Your photos are more durable than you think.

"Acid free" is a marketing ploy. You can manufacture an acid free product, but you can't make a product that is temperature controlled, dust repellant, sunlight resistant and moisture-proof. All those things will do far more damange (in less time) than acid ever will. Labeling some products "acid free" is like repackaging food products with labels like "Zero trans fat"...when it never had trans fats to begin with!