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Too posh to pasteProfessional scrapbookers earn up to $150 an hour making memories for folks who don't have the time or the 'talent' by Laura Lind Well, she doesn't exactly put it that way, but on her Fun Facts Publishing Web site she explains that you can earn between $50 and $150 an hour scrapbooking, with virtually no set-up cost. Some people, she says, prefer to "hire out" their scrapbooking, much like they would pay professional organizers or house cleaners, rather than learn how to do it themselves. If you're wondering why anyone would need a professional to assemble a scrapbook, it's time you woke up and smelled the rubber paste. In middle-class homes, scrapbooks are the new measure of domestic adequacy. If you just stick your photos in chronological order in magnetic albums, well you might as well be leaving your children down at the laundromat while gambling away your afternoons. Any responsible mother wanting to hold her head high at the PTA should be spending at least $50 a month (some people spend $50 a day) and her spare hours (between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m.) documenting, cropping, matting, embellishing, hole-punching and stamping little doodads all over the family scrapbook. So if drunk uncle David was in a rage at Christmas dinner and made faces in every photo, you can cut him out and leave the Norman Rockwell image of the turkey landing on the table. Then, when your kid is in therapy in his twenties and blaming you for all his problems, you can hand him the scrapbook and say, "Show this to your shrink, bucko -- we were a happy family." But I digress. People who don't have the time, money or "talent" to scrapbook are hiring others to do it for them -- for thousands of dollars. Even if you're talentless they'll hire you, according to DiFranco. She advises, "Don't question your own 'scraptistic ability.' Most clients actually prefer the look of simple layouts. And because they're not scrapbookers themselves, they won't be comparing your work to anyone else's." What an ideal client base. With her secrets, DiFranco claims you can scrapbook for celebrities: "With just one or two of these clients you can replace your entire income!" She enumerates 28 different client types a scrapbooker can solicit, including one "little-known client type that will bring in your biggest paycheques, guaranteed." Who would be ... we can only guess -- DiFranco didn't return my politely worded voice and e-mail requests for an interview. Although DiFranco says anyone can set up shop as a CSA -- "Creative Scrapbook Artist" -- for as little as $50, her manual alone costs US$129. Nor does she factor in the expense of moving to Los Angeles or New York to meet all these celebrities. Then again, who's to say you can't find scrapbooking clients in other cities? With a little checking I found two Toronto-based professional scrapbook artists. They don't call themselves CSAs, and their lives seem a lot less glamorous than the movie-star hobknobbing to which DiFranco alludes. Scrapbooker Paula Petty's first paying client was a man who wanted her to document the life of his wife's Rottweiler. Thirty-five pages of photos of her dead Rottweiler. "It was hard," says Petty. "All the photos were pretty much the same -- this black dog on a background of brown and green. So I broke it into themes. The dog at the cottage. The dog at the lakeside. The dog as a puppy." Her client was a friend so she charged him $10 a page. Now she charges $20 a page plus the cost of materials. To make ends meet, Petty also works in a box factory 40 hours a week and spends another 20 working at Scrapbooks by Design, a Toronto scrapbooking shop. She bills herself as a "trendy scrapbooker" and estimates she earns about 10% of her income making scrapbooks on the side. Her co-worker, Lynne Leech, a scrapbooking teacher and clerk at the store, has done higher-profile jobs. She was commissioned to help members of Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman's staff make a scrapbook commemorating the First Nations Book Program. "All the people in his office are really brainy," says Leech. "They're not very crafty, so they didn't know what to do." She put together the first eight pages to get them on their way. "It was a big deal," Petty says of her co-worker. "She got a thank-you letter from the government." Petty and Leech mainly scrapbook for friends or people who come into the store. Although DiFranco writes that you can become a "celebrity" in your own community by scrapbooking, Leech and Petty deny this. They say the real "celebrities in scrapbooking" are people like Karen Foster and Becky Higgins, who have their own product lines of scrapbooking gear. "Even [former Entertainment Tonight host] Leeza Gibbons has her own scrapbooking line," Petty says. She hopes to land one of her layouts in a scrapbooking magazine, which pays US$50-$75 a page. Or she would like to be an advertising designer for one of the scrapbooking companies. That is where the real scrapbooking money is being made. Asian factory workers stamp out US$3-billion in scrapbooking supplies a year. Many products are little paper 3-D stickers that cost pennies to make and are sold for $6-$8 a package. If you could draw designs for them, little duck heads or cowboys, you could be an artist and get a good job. by Laura Lind |
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