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Scrapbook Insider: Young scrapper dares to be different - check out his pages

Posted: 2/2/2008

Mitchell Kraft could live at home, but like a lot of college students he’d rather have his own apartment. His mom went through the same thing with Mitch’s sister, so when the time came for her son to leave, she appeared ready to let go.
    "She didn’t cry until I came back for my scrapbook stuff," Mitch says.
    There’s a lesson here, mamas, though it’s not quite the one Waylon and Willie sang about.
    Mitchell Kraft What intrigues me most about Mitch is not his gender, his age or the fact that he prefers scrapbooking to just about everything else. It’s that his mom is his mentor, and his friends encouraged him to keep scrapping when, at first, the two didn’t click.
    If you’ve ever wandered into a scrapbook store and mistaken it for a Babies R Us, you understand Mitch’s disconnect. For years, the message from the scrapbooking industry - and practitioners themselves - has been that if you don’t have kids and a husband, or dream in pastel, you need not apply.
    Even today, there is a certain backlash against anyone who dares to be different; after Mitch was named to the 2007 Creating Keepsakes Hall of Fame, a few petty scrapbookers mocked him on message boards rather than welcome him to the fold.
    I’m not one to subscribe to stereotypes, but I’m embarrassed to admit that I tried much harder to interest my daughter in scrapbooking than my son. Neither showed much interest - unless you count folding a piece of colored paper in half and passing it off as a Mother’s Day card.
    I suppose many kids see scrapbooking as a "mom’s thing," but there is definitely something amiss in "Pleasantville." And I, for one, hope Mitch is our Tobey Maguire, ready to use his influence to shake up a complacent world.
    Mitch is a student at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, where he is majoring in photography and graphic design. Before that, he was a Minnesota farm boy whose interest in scrapbooking was sparked by a trip to the state fair.
    Using construction paper - shriek! - and not much else, Mitch and his friends made a scrapbook of their day. But in terms of making art or something we would call scrapbooking, forget it.
    "But the more I stuck with it, the more I got hooked," he says. "Now I love it. I love everything about it."
    It never occurred to Mitch that scrapbooking was a "girls-only" thing. It was tougher persuading his contemporaries. When he took a job at a local scrapbooking store, customers just assumed he was the owner’s son, forced to man the counter and make change.
    Today, he’s comfortable being one of a few, he says. The more difficult challenge, at least initially, was finding materials and design ideas for his favorite subjects - outings with friends, pets and himself. Clearly, Mitch has found his niche and he’s not afraid to experiment. Many of his pages are 6-by-12 instead of 12-by-12, and he uses lots of layers - paper, paint, stickers, stamps, transparencies. He gets ideas from school, billboards and logos on the sides Workshop: ’Catnap,’ by Mitch Kraft. Read how he put the page together below. (Courtesy of Mitch Kraft)of trucks. And his work, displayed throughout The Scrapbook Shop in St. Paul, is pure inspiration.
    Mitch credits his stick-to-itiveness to his scrapbooking mom and sister, and the three get together regularly for family crops. Someday, Mitch would like to own a design business and have his own line of scrapbook products.
    His advice to other ing%E9nues is to ignore the criticism and stick to what you love. "It applies to life in general, not just to scrapbooking," he says.
    Who said you shouldn’t let your babies grow up to be scrappers?
    Linda Fantin can be contacted at scrapbooking@sltrib.com. Workshop: ’Catnap,’ by Mitch Kraft. (Courtesy of Mitch Kraft)
    
    Workshop
    ’Catnap,’ by Mitch Kraft
    Rather than provide instructions, we asked Mitch to describe his layout, his inspiration and any design techniques he employed.
    
    "I love the color of my cat’s eyes. So I picked out some products that were similar in color to try and make them pop. Next I used the orangish-red from the pillow in his basket to choose the warm orange products. The blue worked nice with the orange because they are compliments and I just loved the shaped paper from Making Memories.
    "Technique-wise, I like to ink (or sometimes sand) the edges of my photos to separate them from the background and make them stand out. I try and use some design ideas to draw the eye: bringing the orange from the bottom of the photo across using the pattern paper, playing up the green with a big chunk of color, adding some contrast to the horizontal strips of paper with the vertical tag from 7 Gypsies and the overlay from My Minds Eye.
    "The rest is just playing - adding fun stuff I find as I look through my supplies. It’s always a process of trial and error. Give something a try and if it’s not working get rid of it."
    
    One for the money
    If you want to save money, switch to 6-by-12-inch pages. Your paper goes twice as far and you don’t need as many photos or embellishments to fill out the page. For reduced-size albums, check out Bazzill’s selection.
    
    Buy the book
    Show and Tell, Making Memories, $19.99
    If you remember the thrill of having something cool to bring for Show and Tell, then you’ll love this book of inspiring projects. It shows how many products are sitting around the scrapbook room waiting to be rediscovered and used in new ways. One example: Try using rub-ons on paper flowers.
    
    Products we like
    Tom Holtz Exotic Lands trading cards, $.79
    Autumn Leaves Donna Ferrer "Scribbles" transparencies, $3.30
    Basic Grey Lily Kate rolls of ribbon, $10.30
    EK Success NBA/Utah Jazz stickers, $5.30
    Zsiage Shaken or Stirred papers and cardstock, $15.30