It’s a good chance you’re going to get a complete picture of a person when, looking through their scrapbooking gallery, you see a layout titled, “Love Never Fades” next to a layout called, “Cats Are Butts.” Those pages represents two very different frames of mind.
Can scrapbooks become an alternative form of the memoir or autobiography?
I think so, and my visit to Rebecca (“Becca”) Lundin’s gallery confirmed my opinion. Having known of Becca on 2 Peas In A Bucket for a year and a half, and having read many of her comments and posts on the message board, I realized I had no idea who this spunky twenty-three year old girl was until I looked through her scrapbooking pages.
It was her layout about hating laundry and cleaning dishes that first pulled me in. How many scrapbookers do you know that title their pages with the candor of, “Man, Dishes Bite,” and then decorate them with glitter and flowers? It is this type of un-self-conscious humor that felt to me like an invitation to come inside.
I wasn’t surprised when Becca told me, “My scrapbook is more of a journal than anything else.”
She’s not even trying to be funny. It’s just what comes out of her. When I asked Becca if she was conscious of putting humor into many of her pages, she said, “I don’t think I am aware of the humor in my layouts. They’re just my thoughts, and I am a sarcastic fun loving girl. I don’t like to scrap the usual and I find much more satisfaction in scrapping the more ‘weird’ subject matter.”
Like the rest of us, though, Becca is a three-dimensional, complicated person with a serious side and her own pocketful of struggles. She exposes those struggles in layouts like this:
“My style tends to always be straight lined and I enjoy the brighter colors. I have leaned more to the graphic side of scrapbooking within the last month or so but I will never stay with one style. I will pop back over to cluttered eye-candy sooner then I know it.”
Becca may do a lot of style exploration, but one thing is present in most of her layouts: the straight lines. You can see how she often divides up her space into varied-sized-compartments and puts embellishments around and within them. But there is nothing mechanical or “pre-determined about Becca’s process. Her method is as spontaneous as her personality seems to be.
“Inspiration for my layouts is my life around me. It is what ever I am thinking or feeling. What ever I find funny or annoying. As far as how the layout turns out I just sit down and start working. There is no predetermined finished product in mind, nor will I try to emulate a layout I have seen. It just comes.”
I had to ask Becca if there is any subject she won’t touch. Her answer to me was, “I can’t think of any. I have scrapbooked my most embarrassing moments, my saddest moments, and all those in between. I feel that if you are there to scrapbook memories you should scrapbook all of them and not just the select ones. Not just the happy one or the cute ones, but ALL of them. This is your life. It is the road that has made you who you are, and you should remember it.”
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Note: All four layouts in this posting belong to Rebecca Lundin.
