By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 30, 2006

In a suburban living room in Fauquier County, Bonnie Schmidt pulled a thick scrapbook from a shelf full of thick scrapbooks -- she's finished about 40 so far, a number that translates conservatively into 9,000 photographs, most starring the life and times of her only son, Matthew, who is 5.

Here is Matthew in her belly, she said, flipping the pages. Matthew on his first day home and on his third, Matthew jaundiced, Matthew asleep, Matthew at Christmas, posed in a pile of ribbons. Here was Matthew in the sun, in the snow, waving goodbye -- page after page of her son, all cropped, narrated and embellished with color-coordinated borders and stickers, all enshrined on acid-free, lignin-free paper.

"It's become an integral part of our lives," said Schmidt, 37, explaining her passion for recording all the major and mundane events of her family's life. "What if he's 30 and he says, 'What was it like?' I think of it like ancient Egypt, so in 2,000 years we'll have this huge window into life because we saved it all."

In a way, legions of women have become amateur documentarians of 21st-century suburban life. With devotion, and, some say, obsession, they have fueled the thriving, $2.5 billion scrapbooking industry, an ever-expanding, ever-more-elaborate supply of photo-safe minutiae: corner lacing punches and circle cutters, rickrack and paisley paper and brads eyelets and packages of thematic word stickers -- on love, on vacation, on childhood -- the better to frame a life.

Lately, digital scrapbooking has taken off, as has a religious subgenre called faith-booking, in which spiritual journeys are chronicled. There are dozens of scrapbooking magazines, scrapbooking conventions and a multitude of scrapbooking cruises, luxury retreat weekends and social gatherings such as Scrappin' Friday nights in a living room in Gainesville, Scrapaganza in a Manassas library and Freaky Friday at Scrapbooks Plus, a store in Chantilly, where women work on their pages and talk about the lives they are trying to preserve forever.

"In the first three years of my daughter's life, I took, like, 8,000 pictures," said Christine Judd, 36, who was there on a recent Friday night along with a dozen or so other women who spent six hours cropping sons and daughters and pressing them onto pages.

"Well, maybe it was more like 7,000. I gave up on doing the books chronologically. So now I do categories, like, 'Here's playtime,' or 'Here's her being an artist.' "

"It's hard to find time to do it at home," said Cori Seiler, 34, a mother of two. "I can't find the time or the energy. Once I put the kids to bed, I just want to veg in front of the TV."

"And I work," said Judd, a programmer.

"I do, too," said Seiler, a part-time contracts administrator.

Then she happily announced: "I'm going on a paper hunt."

She put down the photos of her spaghetti-smeared son and headed into the store, a world of little flower stickers and cardboard shapes, glitter and ribbons and racks of patterned paper, all organized by theme. "With paper," Seiler said, "I tend to be impulsive."

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.

"I jot down whatever is going on in our lives that month," said Jennifer Henson of Ashburn, a director with the company. "Then I'll do what a typical day is for us right now."

She'll take photos not just of her family but of the street, of the cars, of the gas station around the corner or else note the cost of a Big Mac. Including the ones she is working on, Henson estimated that she has about 100 scrapbooks.

Although some women suffer what they call "scrapper's block," others battle the opposite issue: They begin to see the world as a fine, double-page layout.

"It's so strange because you'll be out somewhere, and literally the title of the page will come into your head," said Sara Schermerhorn of McLean.

At a recent trip to the zoo, she kept seeing the title "Going Bananas!" hovering over her children. As many mothers have, she has taken her kids to a pumpkin patch, she said, because it would make a good layout.

Michelle McVaney, who runs Get Crafty, a scrapbooking retreat in West Virginia, said that some women wheel in suitcases of photos and crop for 24 hours straight, without sleep. It is easy, she said, to fall into an obsessive mindset, to believe that something is lost forever if it is not scrapbooked.

For instance, her grandmother died last summer, and at the funeral, McVaney realized that she didn't have a photo of her grandmother's hands.

"She was always tapping her fingers," said McVaney, 31. "So before she was buried, I thought, 'Gosh, as morbid as it would be. . . .' and I took my camera and took pictures of her hands while she was in the casket, trying not to show she was in the casket. . . . You can become a slave to your camera."

Even driving to the supermarket, Suzanne Frollini often chastises herself for not bringing her camera.

"I love sunsets," said Frollini, 40. "And I think, 'Oh, it's a beautiful sunset today. I wish I had my camera.' But . . . who takes a camera to the grocery store?"

Schmidt said she had a minor revelation on that point during a recent family vacation to the Grand Canyon.

She and her husband were on a Jeep ride, and as she looked around at the epic rocks and vibrant orange, she realized, "I look around, I'm seeing a picture.

"You're not looking at it like it's life," she said. "I thought, 'Am I living my life through a camera lens?' "

She's been trying to put down the camera a bit more often. The last time it snowed, she managed to simply go sledding with Matthew, leaving the camera behind.

"I had one second of regret," she said. "Then I thought: 'I'll be okay. It's fun.' "