Explore Practitioners 3: Scrapbooking – Teo Zi Lin

My friend is an amazing scrapbooker. She never fails to add smiles to people’s faces by gifting them beautiful handmade cards full of sincerity. To sum up, scrapbooking is a conventionally method of preserving, presenting, arranging personal history in the form of a book, box, or card, or as a gift to others. Scrapbook albums are often decorated and frequently contain extensive journaling.

Tools used

Basic tools and inks/stamp models/sponges.
Coloured pens and coloured/decorative tapes.
Decorative stickers and decorative postcards/bookmarks/pegs.
Decorative papers and scrapbook/journal/planner.
Sketch of tools used in scrapbooking.

Worksite documentation

Scrapbooking is usually done in the practitioner’s room, where he/she keeps all her scrapbooking materials and tools. Thus, scrapbooking is a really convenient practice that you can do in the comfort of your own home.

Example of desk in practitioner’s own room (image courtesy of IKEA). My friend did not wish for her room to be photographed, so I took a sample room desk picture from IKEA.

Process documentation

I got to play around with the distress ink and stamp models. The idea behind the distress ink is to “stress” the paper, such that it looks aged with a vintage look. Below is a video of how paper distressing is like.

Process of paper distressing.

My process of making a card was heavily focused on trying to find inspirations online and from my friend. It sucks how I lack creativity juices. I looked through her past works to gain inspiration.

My friend’s past scrapbooking/craft works.

While I was trying to finish my card, my friend finished decorating and conceptualising 2 months of her planner (talk about need for speed).

I love how she comes up with a theme for each month. She did these pages using coloured pens and markers mainly.

After a couple of hours, I managed to do up the card below. I used the distress ink to make the paper cutouts look aged, along with vintage stickers I took from my friend. Why “Say cheese!”? I have no idea… It just came to mind haha.

Pain points

I think the main problem I had was really with the creativity part. Also, because my friend had so many scrapbooking tools and materials, it was hard to decide and find what I want to use. Thus, a sorting or organising system would be great. Distressing the paper was also a challenge because it is difficult to make the aging look natural. Maybe a distressing time machine to speed up the natural aging process of the paper would be apt to compensate for my lack of skills.

Teo Zi Lin (A0160163R) – Practitioner 3/3

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