About

I created this blog to showcase that men can and should scrapbook. Collecting and archiving memories is not an exclusive feminine quality and my goal is that our culture will begin to appreciate men who embrace the importance of relationships, time spent with others, and the value of reminiscing.

This blog will showcase my development as a scrapbooker as well as explore masculine forms of Scrapbooking. I plan to explain the design of each set of pages, how they were created, and the tools used.

Philosophy of Masculine Scrapbooking

I have developed my own philosophy of Scrapbooking which is influenced by being a male and the strengths that I have. I believe that the photographs must be central to the design, that ephemera should be included, and that the design must reflect the event being captured. I very rarely include anything to just make the page “look pretty”.

Ephemera are items that you collect from the event or location that you are scrapping. For example it could be the tickets to the event or stickers from the location souvenir store. We like to find crazy ephemera, such as sand from major league outfields, bark from trees, and even props from plays.

History

I am a single father of a teenage boy. I adopted my son in the Spring of 2008, but he had already lived with me since 2007. When he moved in with me I knew that I was going to have to be both his dad and mom, and knew that I would need to have some way of storing our memories together.

I grew up in a family that scrap booked. My mother scrapbooked when she was young in the fifties and sixties and carried on that tradition when we were missionaries in South Africa. My father’s sister is also very crafty and was the first in the family to start with the contemporary scrapbook style, which my mother and sister soon followed.

I went on a month long trip of Europe to celebrate the completion of my Master’s degree and when I returned with over 1000 pictures I knew that I wanted to create a scrapbook to hold all of those wonderful memories. I sent two weekends at my mother’s house creating the two scrapbooks which were my first attempt and have a lot of my mothers influence in them.

I really started creating my own masculine style of Scrapbooking when I started scrapping the journey that my son and I were taking together, and have been enjoying the craft ever since.