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Scrapbooking gets digital makeover

Posted: 4/13/2008

For the Herald

Today’s technology has unraveled a craft in the last 1 %BD years that few women %97 even a few men %97 can resist. Digital scrapbooks are inspiring folks to create tomorrow’s history with virtually %91zip’ for time.

Susan Jewett of Eleva holds up two of the books she designed with digital scrapbooking software, which she sells. Susan and dozens of others will be at the Falls Stampede Stampin’ N Scrappin’ Expo on Saturday, April 12 at 29 Pines in Chippewa Falls.
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Photo by Peg Strand / For the Herald

They’re the newest rage for busy moms in the $300 (now plus) million-dollar-a-year hobby industry. They simply beat-the-clock over the traditional scrapbooking method.

“I enjoy the simplicity of it,” says Susan Jewett of Eleva.

Although Susan loves the tactile fun of merging photos and script to patterned papers the traditional way, she’ll forsake it for a way to create a quick gift book.

“I don’t want to take two hours per page,” she said. “That’s not where I want to put my time.”

Jewett loves problem-solving. And since people are more involved in taking pictures than ever before, and spending significant dollars, she jumped at a way to keep photos off a computer screen and stuffed in a shoebox. Free %97 yes, free %97 digital software, does it.

A seven-year, independent consultant with Creative Memories, also a wife and mother of three active children involved with school and sports, Jewett found she could complete a 10 sheet, 20-page, one-of-a-kind hand-stitched digital Storybook in four hours.

“I had never seen the program before,” she says. “I’m not a (computer) guru by any means.”

Want to see this digital miracle? Jewett is one of 13 vendors from Midwest Wisconsin who are set to display and sell an array of stamping and scrapping products at the 2nd Annual Stampin’ and Scrappin’ Stampede set for Saturday, April 12 at the Eau Claire Travel Center, aka 29 Pines %97 Highway 29 and County Road T.

This is her first year with the event that’s sponsored by Chippewa Falls Chapter BF, P.E.O. Sisterhood, to raise funds for local scholarships.

From 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Jewett will be demonstrating perhaps one of the quickest ways to preserve and showcase life’s little and big stories.

She looks forward to it. Having demo-ed her company’s products at other expos, she’s fascinated by the kids who listen to her spiel, then drag their mom back to her booth and repeat everything she’d explained in three minutes.

“Like they’re the expert,” she grins.

“For me, this is a passion,” she says, whether she’s presenting a weekend workshop, hosting a living room get-together or speaking at Senior Day at the UW-Eau Claire. “Everyone has a different need.”

A gentleman once showed up at Susan’s workshop and for four solid hours poured over his scrapping travelogue. The ladies tittered and whispered wondering who he was. Turned out he was someone’s husband who had been on an African safari.

Jewett assures potential customers that producing their first digital Storybook “is a short learning curve.”

Once one page is done, the process is repeated.

Since the free Creative Memories StoryBook Creator 2.0 software is a desktop application, you only need to be connected to the internet when you download the software and when you order. It has two free themes: basic black and basic white.

Want more? Other themes are available as a free download, and several others can be purchased. You can purchase fixed templates in the latest artwork styles. It’s even updated on a regular basis, and you’re notified the next time you open the software. It has a good %91help’ function, and three-minute tutorial.

However, the CM upgrade %97 the StoryBook Creator Plus that sells for $59.95 %97 offers page template designs that are completely changeable rather than fixed. The crafter has a wide choice of background color, geometric shapes, and nature-like and/or patterned papers, just like Creative Memories’ traditional scrapbooking papers. And you can print off individual pages in addition to creating the StoryBook albums.

Punches on the PC are the same “as the actual punches we sell,” she says, and on the upgrade disc, you can import clip art. You can cut and paste. You can scan a child’s art work, choose a 3-D effect (shadow), choose from black and white or sepia photos, add %91brads’ to a photo’s four corners, even choose the opacity of a photo %97 like the thickness of velum, from 0 to 100.

“It’s infinite what you can do,” she says.

StoryBooks start at $40. Crafters can buy additional pages at $1.25 per page. Personal preference determines book size: 8 X 8, 8 X 11-1/2 or 12 X 12. There are three cover options %97 personalized, linen, or a matte leather-look, with or without windows.

These decisions reached, an uploaded preview walks you through the order process. Click a button and the StoryBook zips to the Creative Memories Technology Center in St. Cloud, Minn. to be printed, bound, and shipped ($7 for the first book, $2 for gift multiples) to your door in an approximate three-week turnaround.

But before you send your book off, Jewett suggests checking it until it’s error-free. And be sure the text, the journaling, explains your photos. “I’m all about the story,” she says. “If people are looking at your StoryBook %97 and you’re not there %97 what would you want them to know?” She teases, however, that if you choose not to add text, “I won’t hunt you down.”

Jewett says her grandpa (Selmer Gunderson) once offered her this advice: Find a job you like and find someone to pay you to do it. She did. Susan holds a bachelor of arts in economics from St. Olaf’s College and an master of science in physics from East Michigan University (EMU), yet the flexible hours of independent consulting appealed when she was a young mother. They still do.

As a mother of Casey, 12, Gunnar, 10, and Steinar, 8, and a wife to David, she’s able to balance schedules and host perhaps three demos per week in her basement where built-in cubbies hold all facets of scrapping products.

Falling into the top 250 Creative Memory consultant achievers (from a field of 45,000 in the nation, more than 90,000 worldwide), she and her husband were able to lap up the luxury of a Mediterranean cruise.

Jewett’s biggest pleasure is when customers %91light up’ as they see a solution.

She’s amazed that digital scrapping has become a mainstream, niche market.

“Five years ago, I never would have seen this coming.”

Peg Strand is a freelance writer from Chippewa Falls.