Everyone has a story

to tell.

Most everyone’s stories are contained in a stack of photographs. But how to pull them together in some coherent form to tell the very personal story of a family?

Scrapbooks – sophisticated collections that combine photograph album and personal journal – is a craze that has spread all over the country.

Classes and stores are devoted to scrapbooking, or cropping. Glenwood Springs is just beginning to experience the fun.

Two months ago, Mountain Memories opened at 720 Cooper Ave. in downtown Glenwood. Shannon and Mike Moller offer a dazzling array of scrapbook supplies, including albums, pages, stickers and paper cutters.

Moller, who has been into scrapbooks for eight years, was surprised when she moved to Glenwood Springs and discovered it had no outlet for supplies. It seemed a golden opportunity.

On opening day in September, the line was so long “there was a 45 minute wait to check out for three hours,” she said. Business has been steady ever since.

Marie Leavitt, a Glenwood Springs scrapbooking consultant, offers an alternative with her line of Creative Memories scrapbook products, classes and home demonstrations.

“The whole idea is not just to put pictures in an album but to write a journal,” she said. “The picture doesn’t always tell the story. You need to write about it, then it needs to be preserved.”

Even more than that, scrapbooks allow you to organize family photographs according to a particular theme or present the family’s history in chronological order. The albums preserve memories for future generations, using materials that slow degeneration of photographs.

There are endless ways to put photographs together. Wedding albums are popular, as well as albums celebrating the birth and growth of children. Albums can be set up as calendars to remember a year past.

What Leavitt and Mountain Memories offer are decorations that adorn each page and make it unique.

There are stickers for holidays and special occasions, die cut silhouettes, borders, cutters to make fancy corners on photographs and colored papers on which to mount them. There are adhesive dispensers for mounting pictures, glue pens and sprays, papercutters, stencils – just about anything you can imagine to make an album page tell a story.

Leavitt created pages to record the growth of her son Graham. The page heading reads, “This is the story about me, Graham Leavitt, and the people who love me.”

On one page, Marie cut one-inch cubes of Graham’s face and pasted them into the squares of a calendar page. She’s titled it, “The Many Faces of Graham.”

Both Leavitt and Moller offer classes in scrapbooking. Leavitt will host a “crop” class for those currently working on scrapbooks, beginning Jan. 9. It runs the second and fourth Thursday of the month. She’ll also offer a class on how to make a sweetheart album, a folding card that will hold four photographs, on Thursday, Jan. 23, at the Glenwood Springs Community Center.

For information, call Leavitt at 384-2935.

Moller offers continuing beginning and advanced scrapbooking classes. The next beginners’ class is from 6-8 p.m. Jan. 16. The cost is $15 and includes all supplies. For information, call 947-9644.