Introduction
We want our [tag]scrapbooks[/tag] to last forever. However, none of us is going to live forever no matter how much we may want it; and neither will they. While it’s great to imagine our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren looking through our scrapbook and thinking how wonderful things were in our day, how handsome great-great-great-great-great Uncle Dave was, and what exciting, pioneering lives we lived (!) let’s not kid ourselves it will happen!
If you doubt my theory, just think how tastes vary and how often we throw out something we didn’t think we liked only to wish a few short years later that we hadn’t thrown it out! Unless we lock our scrapbooks in a vault somewhere – dry and airtight, of course! – and throw away the key, our descendants are unlikely to have one of them in a hundred years time, never mind ALL the scrapbooks we make!
Styles change; things get lost. We’re a fickle people. That’s life. All that said it’s … good to remember and reminisce so long as we’re not wishing for the past. Our memories are precious and no one can take them from us, but life moves on and it’s healthy that we do too.
I’ve started off on this tack because the subject of this article is scrapbooking paper and card. As scrapbookers we’re constantly being reminded that we must use [tag]acid-free[/tag] and lignin-free products to protect our photos. The speed of deterioration of paper has become an issue since paper producers stopped using cotton and linen rags for paper production.
Since moving over to wood as a cheaper source and introducing chemicals to ‘improve’ their products we now have the problem of these acids and chemicals – used to remove the lignin from the wood – migrating from the paper to anything with which it is in contact. Our ancestors had less of a problem with preservation which is why we have some very old products. We will not be so successful unless we take significant measures to avoid chemically enhanced products.
This means that if we want our scrapbooks to last as long as possible we must be prepared to pay the higher price for quality scrapbooking papers that are acid and lignin-free. We should also ensure any products we use from adhesives to page protectors also meet these guidelines.
On the other hand, if we accept at least some of the comments above, we can be happy to enjoy our craft and not worry about how long our scrapbooks will last, instead being satisfied with what we’ve done (and how much we’ve saved in the process!)
To be continued …
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