Quilling for Scrapbooks and Photo Albums

Quilling in Scrapbooks and Photo Albums

I am not the scrapbooking person in our family. That would be my daughter Christie, the one who manages my Ebay store, juggles a full time job, takes care of a husband and two dogs, and makes wonderful scrapbooks. A diehard Yankees fan, she did a great scrapbook to commemorate her first game at Yankee Stadium. What does this have to do with quilling? She used 1/8" navy blue quilling strips to PIN STRIPE the pages for her Yankee Scrapbook.

I, on the otherhand, have a thing about preserving our family history and passing it on to my kids. Between my husband and myself we have five children, all grown. I started keeping family photo albums years ago, you know, take the pictures and then stick them in one of those '"sticky page" things they used to call photo albums. Then a distant relative passed away and when we started going through "stuff", there were all of these pictures with no names or explanations. That's when I decided to redo the family photos. Now they look more like a family story book, with funny little annecdotes about how and when we got the dogs, graduations, weddings,silly pictures etc. After seeing my daughter's scrapbooks, I decided to dress up my photo albums as well. I use quilling strips to border most of my pages, sometimes combining different widths, sometime using border punches on the wider strips. I always have just the right colors to go with all of my pages because the strips come in so many colors. They may not have an adhesive backing like some of the border strips sold in stores, but I use my fine tip glue bottle and I'm good to go.

Several years ago, I was asked to do a taping for the DIY network on quilling for scrapbooks. That really made me think about adding quilling to my own pages. Now, I have ten volumes of family photos, and trust me, there are a lot more quilling paper borders, than there is quilling, but little by little I am going back and adding a little quilled here and there. The albums all sit on a book shelf in our living room and everytime we are all together somebody pulls one out and starts reminiscing. I have put some of my favorite pages up in the picture gallery on my "new" web site http://www.Whimsiquills.com with little blurbs about each one.

It's kind of funny, there are quillers who don't even want to hear about scrapbooks (I think scrapbooking is a lot more expensive than quilling), and when the scrabooking craze first started there were people who said you couldn't use quilling because it wasn't flat. But as scrapbooking has evolved, and more and more dimensional embellishments are being added, the interest in quilling continues to grow. At Whimsiquills, we try to encourage that growth and carry a number of kits and books geared toward scrapbooking. I think the designs in the Accord quilling calendar are perfect for scrapbooking. Twenty years ago, the quillers worried that quilling might die out, today is seems to be alive and well becoming more main stream every day. Hooray!! That's just what we wanted, and the scrapbookers are helping.