Cutting, Pasting and Storytelling Brought Me to My Love of Scrapbooking

By:Lynn Wc aka Linda Slabaugh

I started my working life as a frustrated Social Worker and in just a year I found myself back at home with my parents, jobless. I needed to find a vocation and a position teaching preschool soon became available. I loved working with those little kids. It was fun teaching about colors, cutting and pasting, finger painting in shaving cream, making collages, squishing new play dough and sculpting great masterpieces. Oh and story telling, what a wonderful thing, telling magical stories and taking the kids into faraway places having extraordinary adventures. I did that for several years until I came to the realization, that I could not continue working for less than minimum wage. I knew I loved teaching, I just needed to go a step further. I went back to school and got a second degree as a teacher. For nine years I taught first grade. I found the everlasting reward of the sparkle in a child's eye when they looked up at me and knew they were reading, the joy of mastering numbers and of course the fun in art projects and story telling.

I worked with first grade for nine glorious years before I had to go on to working with older students. Now I teach in an alternative high school and alas, cutting and pasting is not in our curriculum. I really miss those art projects. In the meantime, I married and had two darling children. How could I resist the temptation of taking and collecting pictures of a handsome husband and little blonde-headed cuties.
I was amassing stacks and stacks of magnetic photo albums and had no clue about scrapbooking until a friend brought me out of the darkness by showing me all her scrapbooks and all her cropping supplies. I was hooked. At last I had a way to take

care of all those pictures. I could cut and paste, to my heart's delight and it evolved to coloring and printing, textures and different mediums, wire, buttons, all kinds of paper, die cuts, punches, and paper piecing. I had found cutting and pasting all over again. This time I will not have to give it up and this time my love of art projects and story telling have all come alive again. I am doing something I truly enjoy, but also I am preserving our wonderful family times, our hopes, dreams, and adventures. Special books that I share with my family now and that I will share in the future with my grandchildren. Hopefully they will share them with their children and grandchildren. I love Scrapbooking because it has brought all that I love into a meaningful legacy that will live into the future.

Maybe someday I will be able to open my own scrapbook store and once again experience the joy of teaching cutting and pasting, coloring and punching, story telling and journaling to a whole new set of learners. I will get to see the sparkle their eyes as they find they too have the love of Scrapbooking that I do.

Tomorrow at dMarie Daily: Why scrapbooking is important to me, by Lynette Aanerud