My mother assembled a photo album for each of her six kids – matte black paper and white photo corners holding a roughly chronological assortment of photos. No captions or IDs, much less themes and artistry. I don’t even have photo albums, just shoeboxes full of prints and a boatload of digital photos on my computer.
What craft crazes have dominated other decades to the extent that scrapbooking has? Macramé was big, but I sure don’t remember whole stores dedicated to macramé supplies. I can’t begin to imagine the amount of money being spent on scrapbooking supplies and materials by those who are serious about it.
And, beyond the craft aspect, scrapbooking, on some level, seems to me to be like Victorian hair jewelry…creating something generally aesthetic and possibly public from that which is very specific and personal.
In times past scrapbooks were for keeping family records, photo, etc.
Todays scrapbooking craze seems to be for the sake of the art and craft rather than as maintaining keepsakes.
Other things of the past now in decline or forgotten are tatting, lace making, embroidery, quilting, crocheting, dress making, and ???
Well, in Bruges I definately saw stores full of lacemaking things. I think a lot of things probably were hugely “popular” (often economically, of course) in a local sense. Belgian lace, Parisian hats, Moroccan leather, whatever. Are you looking for more modern crafts in the recreational sense? There were certainly fashions in crafts in the past - quilt patterns came in and out, ditto embroidery styles, etc.
If you go to any Michaels crafts store, the further back you go in the aisles, the further you go into the fossilized remains of hobbies gone by. It’s similar to the way a palentologist will peel back layers of rock to observe the passage of ancient history, one moment at a time.
Well, not exactly, but close. I’ve spent quite some time there as a hobby anthropolgist, as my fiance drags me there about once a week for various crafting supplies.
Just past the scrapbooking suplies are the beading supplies, from the bead craze of the 90’s. An asile over is the picked-over remains of the flower arraging boom that came with everything else Japanese in the late 80’s. You also have the soap-making stuff and the candle making stuff (lots of crossover there, they’re esentially the same thing), neither of which ever really took off*. Then you’ve got your macrame, crochet and cross-stitch stuff. Depending on how far behind the times your store is, the knitting section may either be neglected in the back, or it’s on the march back out front, moving in on the scrapbooking stuff’s prime real estate. Then you have the asile designed to keep husbands and other children happy, with ancient plastic models airplanes, big boxes of crayola crayons and (if you’re in California) big styrofoam spanish missions.
I think scrapbooking has acheived such dominance is because it lends itself to multi level marketing in a way other things don’t. You can have a scrapbooking “party” and have multiple people offering multiple different product lines and not wind up with suburban housewife violence, unlike, say, beads or plastic containers. There are a lot of people that re-sell supplies from places like Creative Memories.
However, I think scrapbooking’s days are numbered, and it’s only a matter of time before knitting pushes it back amongst the beads. I’m not sure what’s next after that. My guess is micro-mini (1/144th scale) dollhouses.
*One of these days I’m going to buy soapmaking supplies when they finally go on super-discount and use my vacuum form table to make pink “Fight Club” bars of soap.
Knitting had a boom in the 1970s, came back in the early 90s (some say it was post-9/11 stress relief), had a little dip in popularity, and now seems to be coming back. At least the poncho boom seems to be over.
As for defunct craft fads, does anyone remember Mod Podge? That was a collage craze that flared up in the 70s, then the late 80s. Go to any rural Quebec flea market and you can still find Mod Podged tables, phones, milk cans…I’m guilty of having worked for a craft store that sold the gunk to unsuspecting “podgers”. I am ashamed at having increased the tacky (Q. Fr. kétaine) level of my province.
You can also still find paint by numbers at Michaels - the ones for kids and the grownup hard ones. I worked for a good long while on one of those during finals once, it was a great stress reliever.
Also, don’t call mah cross stitchin’ a dead hobby! I won ten bucks at the fair from it!
There were and still are entire stores dedicated to patchwork quilting and related crafts. And sometimes, quilting has some of the same aspects of taking personal items and turning them into a crafted object. People often use fabric from old clothing in a quilt. This was especially true in the past, for economic reasons, but now it’s more nostalgia, like scrapbooking. I’ve even seen quilts where each square was made from the printed part of a message t-shirt.
In the museum where I work, we have a large collection of scrapbooks from the Victorian era. Some of them are books of greeting cards (a lot of them are hand-made with pictures cut out from books and magazines), and some are collections of recipes, notes from friends, newspaper articles and the like.
My favorite is a set of about ten books that are pasted over with newspaper articles, little essays and the like. They used to be books on farming until the mysterious scrapbooker used them as an album, labling each carefully as to its categorized contents (“Good Recipes”, “Sermons” “Politicians’ Doings” etc.). One of them is called, “Negro Sayings and Doings.” This one is horrible, because in it the scrapbooker pasted accounts of lynchings amid cartoons featuring black people.
Another scrapbook in our collection features florets made of human hair pasted therein, each with a poem or note from the hair’s donor, and newspaper articles about their marriages or deaths.
