INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW

OK, not minds, plural, but one mind wanted to know about my scrapbooks, so I'm glad to oblige.  As a blogger, I'm quite uncertain what direction to take my blog.  When I look at the statistics, the most popular posts are a jumble.  One is a simple how-to, but the next is one of those rambling jobbies, where very little information is shared.  I know it would be easier if my entries were just straight forward little how-tos for those looking for the information and I do have those. But I know a lot of you already know these things and are just friends visiting, so there's those for you dears.  Guess I'll just amble along writing what I feel at the moment and not analyze it too much.  Maybe Hope and Thrift won't be the most popular blog out there, but who cares?  Didn't start this thing to become the next Pioneer Woman anyway.  So when someone writes and requests some information like how to can water, or how to make sauerkraut, I'm  all but too happy to share.  So today it's scrapbooks.

As I've mentioned about a gazillion  times, I live in a tiny house, so I don't have room to store all those pretty magazines.  So instead I snip out all the information that I want to keep and paste them into cheap little photograph books or even notebooks.  I divide the clippings into several categories; decorating ideas, handicrafts idea (including sewing and fashion), winter, spring/summer, and autumn.

Above is the decorating one.  It include pictures for little vignettes, interesting room arrangements, and sweet little quotes about home.  One of the things that I've noticed is that by having all those clippings in one spot, I was able to get a real sense of the  style I like in decor.  Which in turn saves me a lot of time, because  now when I see a pretty design that I'd like to replicate, I know that  while it's pretty, it's just not my style, so I needn't waste my money on it.

Here's the winter book:

Lots of  toasty recipes and gift-giving ideas in this one.  Plus lots of pictures of snowy scenery and poetry.

The autumn notebook is my favorite.  So many beautiful images of trees and cozy rooms.  And the poets wrote some of their best  thoughts about this season.  Guess everyone is enchanted by it.

spring/summer notebook

In this one there's lot of garden design ideas,  planting information and recipes that use all the fresh produce that we grow and is available during those seasons.

These scrapbooks are like having a compendium  of all your favorite pages from the best magazines.  It's a nice little hobby for a quiet winter's day, when ennui sets in.  Plus they take up very little space.  And people enjoy them.  Whenever I leave them out around visitors, they inevitably will sit downand start perusing them.

My favorite magazines are the old Victorias, Mary Englebreits and those rare Mare Emmerling issues.  I'm fortunate that our local thrift store has a good selection of these old magazines.  Magazines are so expensive now days!  I get just as much satisfaction from the old ones.  And it's fun to see how the tastes have changed over the years.  Some of those old Country Living and Country Homes magazines!  Oh my!  Seems that the way we used to decorate was to hang everything on the walls.  There wasn't an empty wall space.  But now it seems the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction.  The rooms look so sparse that they'd make a Shaker shudder!   Oh!  Another surprising source of good cheap reading  material is your local antique store.  You can purchase back issues of those great old magazine there for a dollar or two.  A lot cheaper than the five or six a brand new magazine cost today.