Well, okay, so it’s been in for a while now.
I have to admit, when I first saw the shop Papier in The Curve, I didn’t think this hobby would survive here -especially not when it cost so much just to get the materials. Imagine my surprise when I noticed more scrapbooking shops popping up all over the place, while shops that didn’t normally offer scrapbooking products started supplying them. I guess the whole scrapbooking thing has really taken off…
This is the first scrapbook I ever made after our honeymoon as a gift for some friends in Japan:
Somewhere around the middle of the album, I was starting to lose my enthusiasm for scrapbooking. By the time I got to the end of the album, I pretty much got over the need to express myself artistically.
Recently, after much nagging, I finally developed more photos of Gavin and decided to make another scrapbook of Gavin’s baby photos. I ended up developing so many photos that I had enough photos for three large albums.
Since I had so many photos, I adopted a rather minimalistic approach to decorating my pages. Firstly, I crammed too many photos onto one page.
Secondly, I used very little decorations for each page.
Forgive me for sounding cheap and miserly when we’re talking about happy memories, but when you consider that these sticker letterings cost me RM15,
and these stickers cost anywhere from RM15-25, and add the fact that I have 180 pages to decorate, it is starting to get a little out of hand, don’t you think?
The up side of taking the minimalistic approach was that I completed one album a lot more quickly than it took me to finish the album I made after our honeymoon.
Only in Malaysia does a hobby like this cost so much. I remember being able to buy art and craft supplies from Spotlight in Melbourne for such reasonable prices that it didn’t seem so outrageous to keep such hobbies.
That said, there is a trick to scrapbooking in Malaysia at a more affordable price. Instead of using the stickers and all those fancy supplies, you can buy the decorative cards that they have available for the backdrop and cut out the pictures for decorations. Instead of costing some RM15-25 for 10 to 20 stickers, you can get a whole lot more pictures for RM5-15.
If you really want to go cheaper, just use some cutesy wrapping paper which will give you a heck of a lot more pictures for RM1.50-2.00. I don’t think you can get cheaper than that.
Now I can go back and add some more colour to the first album I made…
That said, though, I have to admit my efforts at scrapbooking are rather lame when you compare them to stuff like this.
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June 25th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
[...] post has been moved here. I’m trying to redefine the topics of my blogs and it seemed more relevant to the marriage [...]
July 15th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
[...] case you’re wondering about my little scrapbook project, well, it’s still going albeit rather slowly. I guess I just don’t really have the [...]
September 14th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
The problem with using wrapping and such is that most are not acid free and might ruin your photos in the long run. The reason scrapbooking items are much more expensive is that they are almost always acid and lignin free, as well as archival safe. And scrapbooking items are also sometimes categorized as stationery which attracts up to 25% in duty and tax.
September 16th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Thanks for the tip! That’s what you get for listening to a beginner in this hobby with little to zero experience… Looks like another example of penny wise pound foolish. I guess I’m better off sticking to the acid free cards then. Those are the same ones used for scrapbook backing so I think they should be okay to use.
October 24th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
[...] a family memory book to commemorate time spent together (well, it’s a continuous work in [...]