A Basics Dilemma

I wrote in a previous entry about how I had become a more technique oriented scrapbooker recently, and how my previous hordes of consumable supplies were giving way to more reusable tools. So you would think that shopping for starter gifts for a new scrapbooker would be simple, with all of the options of tools available to choose from – something for every price range, style and skill set. But it’s that very multitude of options that has left me with my current “basics dilemma”.

Four years ago when I was teaching Scrapbooking 101 at a local scrapbook store, I recommended a pretty standard tool list to my students which would meet their needs for quite awhile and give them some room to grow their skill set. Those basic necessities included good scissors and a paper trimmer, a black pen, shape templates with a Stabilo pencil, and wet and dry adhesives along with some Undu adhesive remover. A scrapbooking student could scrapbook for a long time with just those basics and consumable supplies such as paper and stickers.

But now, in just a few short years, scrapbooking has changed so radically that several of those items (shape templates and the Stabilo pencil) I don’t use at all anymore. Also, anyone who read my recent entry on my dislike of my handwriting has probably guessed that the black pen rarely gets much use anymore either! And at the other extreme, instead of two workhorse adhesives, I now have an entire drawer of adhesives that I use on a constant basis. And the list of other tools that I reach for “regularly” while I scrapbook has gotten so long I can’t even begin to list them all here: punches, my piercer and stylus, paper needles, ink pads and stamps, just to name a few. So where do you start when shopping for a gift for a brand-new scrapper? What can you hand to someone and say “now you have everything you need for basic scrapbooking?”

This is the dilemma that I have been facing with teaching my mother-in-law. She has recently started doing some scrapbooking as historian of a group that she belongs to. When she first began doing that project I helped her to choose a trimmer and a dry adhesive to start out with. Now that after awhile she is getting proficient with those I want to help her move beyond them. But the options of simple techniques to teach her have become so broad-ranging that I am having a hard time deciding what to recommend should be her next step!

Perhaps the best solution will be to let her play with some of my tools and decide what she likes, or have her look at some magazines and point out layouts that appeal to her and then teach her those techniques. Instead of dictating to her what she needs, I will let her decide what she wants.

Perhaps that is a hidden benefit of the explosion of techniques in scrapbooking: Even a relative beginner can have their own style!