Savoring Life's Memories, by the Book

She wandered through the silvery wedding aisle, stopped in front of the baseball display, then continued past the vacation section until, just beyond Grand Adhesions, she spotted a tower of pale green and yellow striped paper. She picked out two sheets.

"I bring the [paper] home and my husband is like, 'What are you doing with that?' " she said and then headed back to her station.

According to a 2004 survey, "Scrapbooking in America," commissioned by Creating Keepsakes magazine, scrapbooking devotees are most likely women between 30 and 50. Most have a college education and half of them work full time. The survey estimates that the number of "scrapbooking households" has increased by 4.4 million since 2001 and that the total number of scrapbookers is more than 32 million.

For women such as those gathered at Scrapbooks Plus, the craft is as much about having a guilt-free means of escaping family life as it is about preserving that life in a strap-hinge or top-loading or leather-bound scrapbook.

"Whoops!" said Jill Odom, 35, to herself, "I'm enshrining someone else's tree!"

She was taping her Christmas photos to pages decorated with red and green triangles.

"It's something you can do away from your family but that benefits your family," said Odom. "So it's okay."

"You can socialize, have wine and chat and reminisce," added her friend Jean Ballard, 39. "You get into your own world -- you go out, then you come back in."

Robbie Blinkoff, principal anthropologist with Context-Based Research Group, a company that studies consumer behavior for such clients as the Campbell Soup Co., spent a while observing the scrapbooker. He concluded that what Ballard described as "going out and coming in" was at the root of the phenomenon and others such as the iPod. Blinkoff calls the underlying trend "alone, together."

"It makes me feel part of a larger community, but it also grows my sense of self," he said. "That's what scrapbooking does, especially for moms, who have no time to be creative these days."

And yet, among their thousands and thousands of photos, women tend to include very few, if any, photos of themselves, often because they don't like to be photographed or are reluctant to relinquish control of how their descendants will view their lives in 100 years.

Scrapbooking companies such as Creative Memories, which relies on female "consultants," such as Bonnie Schmidt, to sell products at Tupperware-style parties, push the idea that "everyone has a story," albeit one better told using an $8 Titleopia aligner, or a $35 Power sort box.