Let’s Do The Time Warp!

According to their website, the theme for the CHA Winter 2008 show is “Fashion Crafting”. This is a fitting choice for the scrapbook market segment. But perhaps a better choice would have been “Party Like It’s 1999”.

The latest emerging scrapbooking trends are finally cementing the theory that scrapbooking does more than take its design inspiration from the home décor and fashion arenas. Like those markets, scrapbooking design trends are also proving cyclical, repeating themselves in slightly varied incarnations in a predictable cycle.

Because scrapbooking was a relatively new segment of the craft market, up until now it seemed that everything was new and fresh. But as the segment has matured, it was bound to start the same cycles of the fashion and home décor segments that inspire many of its design elements. That cycle has finally come full circle and become apparent.

A look at work posted online of scrapbookers whose work is considered influential and cutting edge reveals these recurring trends. Paper piecing is back, in a simpler form from its popularity of seven or eight years ago. Paper dolls have also come back, in a less child-like form than their last incarnation. The new ones, favored by alternative style scrappers, are more fashion doll or antique inspired.

And the hottest “new” trend of all – freestyle doodling – is that really new? Again, that “new” trend is simply an updating of an old trend in the style cycle – pen art. I still have all my pens from the trend’s first go-around in scrapbooking, when I tried hopelessly to copy flowers and flourishes from the step-by-step instructions in EK Success’s booklets. Now, it is called freestyle…and I still can’t do it.

Oh, and we can’t forget die cuts. Now instead of going to our local scrapbook store to cut out our die cuts from their collections, many of us are buying our own computer system for cutting die cuts. But the underlying design trend is the same, even if the technology is different.

Predicting trends is an important part of business planning in this industry. Now that the design cycle has come full circle, it will be just that much easier to predict the “next” old big thing.