{Darn economy! Stupid Pinterest! Lame-o digital scrapbooking! LOL}

So I was very happy to discover a new online scrapbook magazine called “LIFE. PAPER. SCRAPBOOK.” It’s from those fab Aussies but features scrapbookers from all over the world.

HERE is their first issue.

HERE is their website.

I know, I know. You can thank me later. {I love Starbucks gift cards, Pashmina scarves, and turkey jerkey, in that order}.

Here is what they’re about, from the LPS website:

Life. Paper. Scrapbook is an Australian quarterly, online publication that is dedicated to showcasing designers from all around the world to inspire each other, explore current trends and techniques and most importantly to celebrate our love of scrapbooking and paper crafts. This is a place to share our style, designs and creations with like minded crafters from around the world.

“Life.Paper.Scrapbook” has it all, including:

New products
Mini albums
Traditional layouts
Info about featured scrappers
Project Life layouts (yeah!)
Just a few ads
and a simple yet lovely layout

What’s not to love? The first issue was 100 pages of pure yumminess. Next issue is scheduled for June 2013, with project submissions due by 05-31-13. Tick tock, get on that, would ya’? I expect to see some of my own peeps in there next time, mmm kay?

So go sit in the bath with your iPad and get all wrinkly while you check out this great new addition to your life.

Cheers!

She’s a Renaissance woman . . . former JAG officer AND a scrapbooker! Schweet. Lookie, she’s even wearing a scrapbooking t-shirt.

Here’s a description from the above website:

Former US Army JAG specialist, Faith Hunter, returns to her West Virginia home to work in her grandmothers’ scrapbooking store determined to lead an unassuming life after her adventure abroad turned disaster. But her quiet life unravels when her friend is charged with murder, and Faith inadvertently supplied the evidence. So Faith decides to cut through the scrap and piece together what really happened. With a sexy prosecutor, a determined homicide detective, a handful of sticky suspects and a crop contest gone bad, Faith quickly realizes if she’s not careful, she’ll be the next one cropped.

Sounds fun, yeah? I’ll be reading this one soon!

In other good news: The subtitle of this book is “Faith Hunter Scrap This #1″ . . . which means this is the first in a series, yippee! Bring on the scrapbook novels. I can’t get enough of them :)

HERE is the link to the Kindle version on Amazon. It’s at 99 cents as of today (01-04-13). According to the AUTHOR ON TWITTER, that price is good through 01-13-13. So snatch it up quickly!

Once you read “Cropped to Death”, please come back and give a review.

HURRY AND GET IT!

Not sure how long it’s free :)

ETA: The author, Kate, commented below and she says it should be free only through 11-20-12 :)

Also, I wanted to make sure that everyone knows – you don’t need a Kindle to download and read Kindle books. Just download the Kindle app to your computer, iPad, iPhone, Nook, Android, Blackberry, or other smart phone and read away!

Here’s a link to [url=http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_361458882_3?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-9&pf_rd_r=065E41TD6J63ERDX7QVV&pf_rd_t=1401&pf_rd_p=1354791482&pf_rd_i=1000301301]ALL THE KINDLE APPS[/url] ~ and they’re all free!

Scrapbooks: The Facebook of the 1800s
BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN

DURHAM – Before Pinterest, before Facebook and before blogs, there was scrapbooking. Not the scrapbooking as sport that some domestic fanatics take on, with store-bought accoutrements. Scrapbooking with scraps of newspapers. In the 19th century, newspapers were cheap, abundant and disposable – and considered valuable, Ellen Gruber Garvey said during a talk about strategic scrapbooking Monday in the Rare Book Room of Rubenstein Library at Duke University.

Some people made scrapbooks with much enthusiasm, filling hundreds with newspaper clippings. What they chose to cut and paste, and how they repackaged that information, remade it, Garvey explained. An English professor at the New Jersey City University, she is the author of “Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance,” just published by Oxford University Press.

Scrapbooking in the 19th century was a democratic practice, Garvey said, and people of all classes kept them. “It required very little money,” she said, and most people pasted clippings into repurposed ledgers or agricultural reports. Mark Twain, however, did invent a self-pasting scrapbook. Some people kept scrapbooks of themselves in the news, like Abraham Lincoln, public speakers and actors. For others, like those who saved newspapers from 9/11 or the election of President Barack Obama, it was about “living through momentous times and keeping a record of it.”

Scrapbooks aren’t always appreciated by libraries, Garvey said, and they’re hard to preserve. They’re like the ancestors to Internet bookmarks, she said. But in “Writing with Scissors,” she includes information from two scrapbooks in the libraries of Duke University and UNC. Duke has a scrapbook by the Solomons family of Savannah, Ga., which was made during the Civil War from 1861-63 in a used ledger from the family business. Clippings from the same battle are pasted again and again of a Confederate victory. The types of clippings chosen show the attitude of the person making it.

“She chooses. She doesn’t take everything she sees,” Garvey said. “It’s her life, circulated and filtered through her ideas, through the newspaper.”

White newspapers of the time assumed its readers were white as well, and shared views on lynchings, black voter oppression and the like, even after the war. Frederick Douglass first found the meaning of “abolitionist” in a pro-slavery newspaper, she said. Black scrapbooking was a way of speaking back to scrapbooks like Solomons’.

“They write with scissors,” Garvey said. Black scrapbooks were used to analyze media with juxtaposition, as written commentary and as black history, she said. North Carolinian Charles Hunter, an African-American teacher, writer and principal in the 1800s, used his scrapbook to compare newspaper clippings of similar criminal accusations, with the black people punished and white people freed. The clippings were pasted near each other. Using the language of juxtaposition is the basic grammar of scrapbooks, Garvey said.

William Dorsey, an African-American historian in Philadelphia, made 400 scrapbooks. Once, called “Colored Centenarians,” was full of clippings of African-Americans who lived more than 100 years.

“Dorsey created a black history out of the hostile white press,” Garvey said.

Women’s rights activists also recorded the suffrage movement’s history, with clippings of their own involvements. In homes, scrapbooks bridged public and domestic life, Garvey said.

Compared to the present day, scrapbooking was very much like reading and saving at the same time, like Facebook, she said. “In many respects, it was similar to LexisNexis – a way of sorting material.”

“Writing with Scissors” is available for Kindle.

Some thoughts after reading the article:

1. ” . . . the scrapbooking as sport that some domestic fanatics take on, with store-bought accoutrements . . . ” is yet another slam on scrapbookers. But I guess we should be used to those by now (eye roll). First of all, if scrapbooking was a sport, wouldn’t I have lost weight by now? And B., I’m the furthest thing from a domestic fanatic you will ever meet {just ask my husband and kids . . . wait, I think they’re under a pile of laundry here somewhere . . . }, but I am a kick-azz scrapbooker. So . . . just . . . NANNER!

2. I love that scrapbooking was more popular with a variety of people, even MEN (!), back then. And that you could tell what was important to them by what articles and clippings they chose to scrapbook. I’ve never thought of it that way but can’t we say the same today? My scrapbooks are predominantly filled with layouts of my kids, extended family, sports, and trips. And yes, those are the most important things in my life at this stage.

3. The African-American and women’s rights aspect is fascinating. How cool that they were able to kind of circumvent the popular press, make their own histories, and highlight what was important to them. This reminds me of the blogging, Twitter, etc. of today: WE the people choose what to post, which articles to Tweet, what is important to us regardless of what the popular media tells us to care about.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE! SCRAPBOOK! HOO-RAH!

{In a million years, I could never have foreseen that I’d write the above line in my lifetime}.

What did you think of the article?

As you may have heard me complain about before {ahem}, I live near very little scrapbook shopping. Within 1 hour of me, there is a MICHAELS and then whatever I can find once in a while at TUESDAY MORNING, TARGET, WALMART, and ROSS. The best scrapbook shopping I have is a BEVERLY’s CRAFTS 40 minutes away so I get there about once a month if I’m lucky. I did recently find a new little LSS about an hour away so that’s cool at least but, again, only a once-in-a-while thing.

What I’m tryin’ to tell ya’ is that I’m scrappy shopping deprived, people!! {Which is one of the reasons I become a MEMORY WORKS consultant several years ago, when we went from 7 LSS’s within an hour down to one and then NONE}.

So when I was recently out of town ~ a town with a Joann’s ~ pardon me for being a bit twitterpated about it ;) On the scrapbook message boards and from friends in other states, I hear about Joann’s this and Joann’s that. I’ve been to a Joann’s on various other trips and always found that a decent amount of scrapbook papers and embellishments had jumped into my cart and forced me to buy them.

I’m also familiar with JOANN.COM and occasionally shop online in that huge-amous store. They have coupons!!! Yeah, I like me some Joann.com + coupons. I have snapped up some OCTOBER AFTERNOON collection packs for 40% off and plenty o’ WRMK 12×12 D-ring albums for 1/2 off and free shipping. I mean, it just don’t get much better than that.

But I have to say my recent trip to the brick-and-mortar Joann’s was quite, quite disappointing :(

There were 4 kinda’ short aisles of scrapbooking stuff. Most of it I’ve already seen at Michaels. Or it’s already been in my stash. For years. Okay, maybe not YEARS but, like, for a WHILE. Jeez.

All the open stock 12×12 papers were boring and/or old. The paper pads were meh, nothing from any of the popular brands I like, nothing stark-raving new. It was all so boring, I can’t even really remember what there was.

The only thing I was even tempted to buy was an issue of ARTFUL BLOGGING because it had a feature on scrapbooker REBECCA COOPER, who I’ve always liked.

But I didn’t because at that point I was in “man, I’m so disappointed in this store so you can bite me” mode. {Sorry, I get that way sometimes … when you get me all built up and then dash my hopes}. Joann, can we talk?!?! If your scrapbooking section is going to be THAT lame, why even have one? Just let it go and get some more BEADS or something, mmm kay??? I might as well have been at Walmart 15 minutes and one less tank of gas from my house.

So I left Joann’s empty-frickin’-handed. Totally harshed my mellow, dude.

This book was written by the lovely COURTNEY WALSH, who happens to be a sweet Pea :) {a member of the TWO PEAS IN A BUCKET scrapbook message board … who is actually a very sweet person}.

I paid full price for this book WHEN IT FIRST CAME OUT and really enjoyed it. It gets a thumbs up from me. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to keep reading because you want to find out “the secret.” Yeah, do I have your attention now? Hollah.

Get this book! Support great writers! Support scrapbook novels! And it only cost ya’ 99 cents! Rah rah go! {And I’m really not kidding about the excuse note. Srsly.}

CUT, CROP & DIE by Joanna Campbell Slan

Go get you some!!

HERE YOU GO.

You can thank me later =)

{Which, if you win, should take the form of sharing some of that booty, eh? Fer shizzle.}

PS: Make that a three-fer. Courtney is posting giveaways all week. Just keep checking HER BLOG. Good luck!

This came out recently but I haven’t been able to find it on my local newstands :( Have you seen it anywhere? I only have Walmart, Target, and Michaels. I ended up ordering it from THE CK WEBSITE. I had a free shipping code but it’s since expired … maybe search and see if you can find another one?

The Peas are talking about “Creative Spaces” HERE (including a Pea whose room is IN the magazine!).

I happen to really disagree with the negative opinions of it posted HERE. I’m finding it to be very inspirational and, as MARTHA STEWART would say, “aspirational.” I’m different from some of the posters in that thread because I *don’t* want to see scrapbook spaces of “everyday” scrappers that are a hodge podge of furniture and organizational bins. I can look in my own non-designer space if I want to see that, LOL!

When I plunk down $15 for a glossy magazine, I want to see all the fancy schmancy scrap digs I’ll never be able to afford. Kinda the same theory of Architectural Digest showing amazing homes you’ll nevah, evah be able to afford, or Vogue with its clothes you can’t afford worn by women (um, teenagers?) who weigh as much as your pinky finger. It’s all about the eye candy, baby! And, yeah, maybe you’ll pick up tips here and there that you can incorporate into your own life.

As it happens, I am finding MANY scrapbook organization ideas in this magazine that I can incorporate into my space. Whenever I get a few minutes of quiet time, I sit down with this amazing issue and take my time with the articles and photos. I think it’s very well organized with great pictures and ideas.

Have you seen this issue? If so, what did you think of it? As always, diverse opinions are welcomed :)

The things that come to those that wait … may be the things left by those that got there first.

If you watch AMERICAN IDOL religiously like I do, I’ll bet you can give a guess who said that friggin’ doozy. Yep, Mr. STEVEN TYLER! The man is full of these funny comments and sayings that have me wondering if he’s drunk or just plain cray-cray. Which I really don’t care, since his voice absolutely rocks and he’s a doll to all the contestants.

I mean, what’s wrong with a little crazy/drunk on national television, right? Never hurt nobody. Welllll, I take that back. There was the little matter of Chris Brown and the BROKEN WINDOW … but I digress.

STEVEN!

But back to my initial point: THE NEW MEMORY WORKS CATALOG IS AVAILABLE!

You’ll find the entire Memory Works product line inside, which features a sampling of the latest-and-greatest supplies in the industry showcased in this striking, full-color, 48-page catalog! Customers will appreciate it as an invaluable scrapbook resource.

New Simple Stories
New 7 Gypsies
New BasicGrey
New BoBunny
New Cosmo Cricket
New Crate Paper
New Creative Imaginations
New Echo Park
New Fancy Pants
New Jillibean Soup
New K & Company
New Lily Bee Designs
New My Minds Eye
New October Afternoon
New Pink Paislee
New Teresa Collins
New Three Bugs
New Tim Holtz
New Stamp Essentials
New Design Essentials
New Ink & Mist Essentials
New Adhesives
New Crop Tools
New Cardstock

It’s taking all the strength I have not to place my order right now for a pack or two of these catalogs (or as we oh-so-professional consultants like to call them, “catties” :). As much as I love to look at all our new items ONLINE, I’m an old-fashioned girl who likes to hold a paper catalog in my scrappy little hands.

However, I’m restraining myself from placing my catalog order because if I can wait a mere 5 more days (until April 25), I can order THIS at the same time … HOLLAH!

It’s the new SIMPLE STORIES “100 Days of Summer” line that I’ve been waiting for since BACK HERE.

i want it i want it i want it i want it NOW!

I can see on my MW website that not only will we carry the “100 Days of Summer” Collection Pack, Designer Cardstock Pack, Signature Elements, Flash Cards, Fundamentals Stickers, and Expression Stickers (click on BACK HERE above to see pics/prices for all of these items) …

… but we will also carry …

AMERICAN CRAFTS “100 DAYS OF SUMMER” COORDINATING CARDSTOCK PACK
$3.75

and “100 DAYS OF SUMMER” RIBBON BUNDLE
$4.00

As always, feel free to leave comments here or e-mail about anything Memory Works – the new catalog, 100 Days of Summer, or any of our other FABU products … scrapbookobsession(at)gmail(dot)com.

I leave you today with another Steven Tyler bon mot:

Well hellfire, save matches, (bleep!) a duck, and see what hatches.

(Oh man, I am SO going to lose customers by posting that, aren’t I? …. )

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