by: Scott Bianchi

I never realized how big the scrapbooking industry was until recently. When researching hobbies for my website I learned just how big it was. My website is designed as an on-line shopping mall. Hobbies are a big part of many people's lives so it made sense to me to have a hobbies page. Scrapbooking is easily the hobby I have the most information about on my site. This is not because I favor it, there is just a tremendous amount of information available for this particular hobby.

What is scrapbooking? It is essentially a much more extravagant photo album. A plain photo album is just that, an album with some pictures on some white pages. A scrapbook has different pages, stickers, themes, and sometimes even tells a story. If you go to your nearest arts and crafts store you will most likely discover aisles and aisles of supplies. They have stamps, special scissors to make different kinds of edges, other kinds of cutting apparatus, every conceivable kind of magic marker you could ever need with different tips, widths, and colors.

My wife recently got into this hobby. She and a friend get together usually once a week to do scrapbooking. Their supplies call my downstairs closet home. They have big Rubbermaid tote buckets full of this stuff. Surprisingly enough, most of the supplies are not all that expensive. My wife's current project is my daughters first year. She has it broken down by birth, and each month leading up to her first birthday. I have to say that it is like art work the way it is done. I am not just saying it because it is my wife's either, I mean in general. I have seen other scrap books and they are equally as impressive. This is why I said earlier that you can actually tell a story with these books, without using words. Just by how the pages are set up and some of the stickers and other supplies that are available you can tell a great story. This hobby does take a lot of planning and patience but the finished product makes it worth it.

Not only is there my wife's form of scrapbooking but in this world of technology you can scrapbook on-line. You can do your pages electronically and then load them on the internet for other people to view. I know much less about how this medium actually works but it was worth mentioning to anyone learning about this topic for the first time.

If you were to do a search on Google for scrapbooking you will find the following link in one of the first few results: http://scrapbooking.about.com/. In reading the first paragraph in this article you will get an idea for just how big scrapbooking is, people plan retreats and cruises with other scrapbookers.

If you are reading this article because you are looking to start a new hobby you may really want to review the above link in great detail. It provides a lot of information to someone looking to get started. If you are already an avid scrapbooker then hopefully you can provide me with some sites you find very helpful. With all the sites available to cover this subject I would never have enough time to review them all. Please email me any sites I may find helpful to host on my hobbies page.