Scapbooking... craft of the devil.

So I wrote this my freshman year while living in the dorms and just found it. It is still true.

Scrapbooking… the craft of the devil. In my opinion, it should be the newest curse word in the English language. “Scrapbooker” should become the newest insult and “oh scrapbook it” should be considered profane. After what I have seen and experienced, never again will I allow this word to be casually spoken in my presence. To type it is a struggle in and of itself. Why you ask? I, although very un-crafty myself, do in fact enjoy the fruits of the labors of others and will even at times participate. Why should I have such poignant and open hatred for such a craft? Because I have seen what it does. I have seen its gruesome effects… particularly on the female gender. I have seen the price that has been paid… no no no… not just the huge amounts of money but the SOULS that have been lost.

These poor girls are under so much pressure to record every part of their lives, and not just in colorful pens and construction paper. Would that it were so! Forsooth, it is so much more than that. These books become a representation of their cuteness, their likeability, their self-worth, their marriageability...in their confused minds they think that if they fail at this, they fail at all that is important in life. These groups of girls are so wrapped up in this so-called "hobby" that their lives are turning into meaningless puddles of nothingness. I would like to relate to you a very real and terrifying experience I had with one such female group.

Their names were Heather, Karen, Danni, and Erika. They lived on my floor. They were sweet girls. They were cute girls. They were fun girls. But it got a hold of them. It started off small and simple…slow at the beginning. But I suppose that it is by small and simple things that great and terrible things are brought to pass. They started off with normal harmless cardstock… solid black. Who can go wrong? A sticker or two here, a stencil or two there. Just to spruce up the page a little. Just to make it a little cuter. But it was never enough. It was never ever enough. Die-cuts came into play (now that is a foreshadowing term- die-cuts) Then came vellum. What in the world is vellum, you ask? They didn’t know either until this fever came upon them. Paper cutters of various sizes. Hole punches. Fiskars scissors with crazy edges. Ribbons, bows, markers, crayons, pencils, pens. They were all purchased by the box, by the case, by the carload. And then came the supplies that only advanced and exceedingly corrupted scrapbookers use: eyelets, brads, glitter, stamps, embossers, templates, magic mesh, scrap metals, little metal flowers and figurines that have no purpose in life but to drive a people mad... it never ended. It was all stuffed into to plastic sheet protectors and clamped into so many books. The money could not be put across the counter quick enough. In their eyes they got a hungry stare as they looked around searching for angles and ideas and staging perfect photographs that fit their mental images. Mental images. It became an addiction. They had to enter the scrapbooking store at least once a day to satisfy the craving. Thousands of colors and designs. Hundreds of dollars. Dozens of books.

It was sad, truly sad. They would cut out hundreds of tiny little dots by hand and paste them one by one until 4.32 hours later they had finally spelled “Ward Social: Pizza Night” across the top of the page. "Why not use stickers?" you ask. "Why not write it by hand?" you wonder. “BECAUSE,” they answer… “IT NEEDS A PERSONAL TOUCH.” Making four thousand seven hundred and twenty one tiny pieces of pizza to tape one by one around the edge of the paper for the border… ignoring the paper for which they had paid $4.48 that already had the pizza border design… they needed the work. They needed the pain. You approach them cautiously and ask to see what they're working on. They shove the pizza page in your face. “Smell here! The tomatoes stickers smell like real tomatoes!” “Press this button! You can here this baker singing while he kneads this realistic dough!” “Pull the tab! The oven really heats up and burns you!” It is an illness. One that cannot be cured by any program or any miracle drug. It is an epidemic.

I walk in one afternoon to check on their status. I haven’t seen Heather, Karen, Danni, or Erika for two and a half weeks. Not in class. Not in church. Not even at meals. I hear a low murmur as I approach room 237. Monotone demands. “Glue stick.” “Glue gun.” “Paper Cutter.” “Hammer.” I slowly take a deep breath and knock on the door softly. No answer. I open it up. What I see causes my stomach to turn. The girls are sprawled on the floor. The beds and desks and sinks have been piled up in one corner of the room… they must have gotten in the way. Bedding, clothes, shoes, and everything else that has nothing to do with scrapbooking had been thrown out the window. The Josh Groban CD had been skipping for the past 8 days. “You’re st… st… st… still… y… you’re…y..y..you’re still y…y..y..y..y..you…. you’re sti…sti..sti…sti….” The four girls (if you can even call them girls) look up at me with squinted blood-shot eyes, unaccustomed to the natural light. The murmuring stopped. They all quickly jump to their feet. I’m shocked by their agility considering the fact that they hadn’t stood in two weeks. After a second or two of their legs getting used to supporting weight again, they approach me their eyes searching me up and down. Karen gets out a camera and begins taking pictures one by one. “This is for my ‘when Lizzie came in the room’ page,” she keeps repeating in a haunted voice. Danni tears at my sweater, asking if it is acid free, demanding I give it to her so she can add “texture” to her "what my closet looks like today" page. Erika is cutting my hair and pasting it to a picture she has of me, claiming it needs to be more “realistic.” She then starts taping things to my face while muttering “Too much empty space, too much empty space.” Now Heather comes after me with a paper cutter and scissors telling me that I'm all off balance. She saws at my elbow yelling “UNEVEN! THIS IS NOT A GOOD EDGE! UN-EV-EN!” Danni grabs me from behind and tries to shove a plastic sheet cover over my head, laughing hysterically. Karen is still taking pictures of the entire scene, cackling insanely while listing off all the scrapbook pages she plans to make. Erika slaps a sticker across my forehead that says “Mommy’s Little Princess” and begins pinning bows in my hair. Heather has collapsed on the group and is hunched over her scrapbooks, sobbing so hard that her cries and mutterings are indiscernible. I scream and beat them off with a hammer Erika had been using to try to pound eyelets into my arm. In desperation, I grab one of the completed scrapbooks and threaten to rip it unless they get away. They all burst into tears and collapse on the floor and I run out. Within seconds, their chanting continues. “Glue stick.” “Glue gun.” “Paper Cutter.” “Hammer.”

Something has to be done about scrapbooking…. the craft of the Devil.