Scrapbooking, from glue to Mixbook

If you’ve been around me much, you’ve probably learned that I love to take pictures. My go-to phrase is “just one more” — though what I really mean is I’ll take as many as it takes.

So I have hundreds of gigabytes of photos and videos, and I’m sure you do too. For twenty-five years I’ve been turning pieces of that into books, and it’s one of my favorite things to do — taking a pile of photos and shaping them into a story you can hold. Twenty projects started, twelve books finished, eight still waiting.

Before there was a website, there was glue

My first two scrapbooks were physical — paper, glue, the whole business — and they came out of two summers working at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, Colorado.

The summer of 2001 I washed dishes, 5:30 AM to 2 PM. Longest days I’d ever worked, straight out of high school. Awesome schedule, though — afternoons for hiking, rock climbing, and learning to fly fish, plus weekends for bigger adventures like my first summit of Longs Peak.

The summer of 2002 I was an Outpost Day Camp counselor for fifth through eighth graders. The week ended with an overnight, so I had a three-day weekend, most of it spent camping. Every week. All summer.

That schedule helped fill out the second book:

Rock climbing Devils Tower. Which is in Wyoming — 6.5 hours from Estes Park. You don’t make that drive with only two days off.
Summiting Longs Peak again, 14,259 feet. We left at midnight to be on top before 10 AM and off the exposed rock before the afternoon storms rolled in. That’s not bravado, it’s just what the mountain requires.
Trekking twenty miles across Rocky Mountain National Park with a friend. We started at the Longs Peak trailhead, summited Mount Alice at 13,000 feet, walked a mile along the top of the Continental Divide, and came down through a series of four lakes, ending at Grand Lake on the other side. Off-trail, navigating by compass.

Those two books are cut-and-glued, one of a kind, and sitting in my house right now.

💡

The YMCA of the Rockies is almost always hiring, and if you’re a recent grad looking for an adventure or want to start a new chapter, I’d point you straight at it. There’s a staff living package with dorm housing and meals, so you can show up without much. One thing to know: the fun jobs get snagged in the fall, so if you’re graduating in spring, apply during your senior year rather than after.

And it isn’t only for the young. They take volunteers too — retirees very much included — with lodging and meals provided in exchange for the work. Couples can be housed together, and Snow Mountain Ranch has a lodge with double rooms set aside for staff and volunteers aged 40 and up. Same mountains, same trailheads.

You won’t make big paychecks. You’ll make big memories.

The Christmas present that changed everything

In 2003 my parents gave my brother and me our first digital cameras for Christmas — and even back then, I remember the first pictures taken were of Satchmo and Miles, our dogs. What stuck with me was realizing I could just keep taking silly pictures of them. No counting how many shots were left on the roll. What a thought!

And then, quietly, the new problem: I had hundreds of photos and no book. The glue and paper didn’t scale past a certain point, and everything I shot after that just… accumulated.

Mixbook, year one

I placed my first order on December 2, 2009. Two books, thirty dollars each, with a free-shipping promo, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Mixbook had launched its photo book editor that year. I didn’t know that at the time — I was just looking for a way to make a book — but it means I’ve been using the same tool since roughly its first year. Seventeen years.

It has gotten enormously better. The thing I’d point to for anyone starting out: you can now multi-select items inside a book and paste them into a different book in another browser tab. Stickers, text, whole photos. If you make books regularly, that one feature saves hours, because you stop rebuilding the same layout from scratch every time.

The twelve I finished

The first two came in that December 2009 order.

Kroutil Tree House Wedding — a weekend of camping, canoeing, fishing, and getting married in a treehouse. Still online, seventeen years later.

A Colorado book for my mom and dad — our trips out there together in 2008 and 2009, made as a gift for them. The symmetry only occurred to me while writing this: they gave me my first digital camera in 2003, and six years later one of the first two books I ever made went back to them.

After that, roughly in order:

Three kid books, made across 2009 to 2021 as the kids grew up
Two Valentine books, plus Richard & Carrie’s Love Story — the running story of seventeen years of happily ever after, which started in that treehouse
A lake summer, 2013 or 2014, made as a 40th birthday gift for my lake bestie. The dock friends, the kids all hanging around together, that whole era
A Colorado hut trip in 2018 — my kiddo’s last spring break before graduating high school. One of my favorites
Mr. Thompson’s Adventures and Miss Kona’s Adventures — I’ll come back to these two

The eight I didn’t

And then there are the eight I started and never ordered: a 15-year anniversary cruise, our lake home remodel, a few more kid books, and my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary — which has sat so long I can just rename it their 55th, dated 2024. That’s the thing about an unfinished project — it doesn’t expire. It just waits for a new title.

Mr. T and Miss Konabear

Here’s what I didn’t expect about making their books: you have to look at every single picture. All of them. And my dogs are, by an enormous margin, the most photographed subject on my camera roll — years and years of them. The first pictures I ever took with a digital camera were of Satchmo and Miles. Apparently that never changed.

So going back through takes a while, and yes, tears are expected, and it’s also the best possible way to spend an afternoon with somebody who isn’t here anymore.

Mr. T and Konabear both got to live big lives, going everywhere with us.

I called them Mr. Thompson’s Adventures and Miss Kona’s Adventures because that’s what they were. Not “in memory of.” Adventures.

If you’re grieving someone, this is the best advice I have: look back over all the great memories and retell their story. It hurts, and then it helps, and you’ll have something to hand to the people who loved them too.

Why paper still wins

Here’s what I’ve come around to.

A printed book is the one copy that doesn’t depend on anything else. No account to log into, no file format to go obsolete, no drive to fail. It just sits on the shelf.

Reprinting is the nice part, not the safe part. As long as a project is still in my account I can order another, give one away, and keep mine — but that half does depend on Mixbook still being there. The books on the shelf don’t.

Would I recommend Mixbook? Yes, genuinely. Flipping through a printed book is magical, and after seventeen years it’s still where I go for scrapbooking joy.

The next one

Which brings me back to those two glued-together books from 2001 and 2002.

They’re the only scrapbooks I own that I can’t reprint. No file, no backup, no second copy. One flood, one fire, one bad move and the summer I walked across Rocky Mountain National Park with a compass is just a story I tell.

So: the next one is going to be photographs of the scrapbooks. A scrapbook of a scrapbook.

Twenty-five years later, the two I can’t replace finally get a backup. Hopefully.