Digital scrapbooking catching on with Drag and Drop

By Sarah Owen
of The Northwestern

The book was supposed to be a surprise gift for Father’s Day, adorned with memories from the family cabin up in Eagle River.

But soon after starting work on her storybook, Jody Schroeder’s entire family was at the computer, tooling around online and dragging and dropping photos into specially themed backgrounds. The latest trend in book-making is contagious.

“I did the traditional scrapbooking, and that takes a lot of time,” said Schroeder, 40 of Oshkosh. “Scrapbooking is limited to what you have at the time … What I like about this is, I can see what it’s going to look like, delete and add from it.”

What she’s talking about is a modern form of preserving memories, a hobby in its infancy in Oshkosh.

And tradition meets technology during the Drag and Drop Scrapbooking and Storytelling classes, sessions held lately at Basic Books by local consultants of founding company Heritage Makers.

“Each person comes at a different stage of their book – some might be sorting photographs, some might be designing their books, proofing their books or journaling,” said Oshkosh consultant Kate Thome of a typical class.

Logging onto www.heritagemakers.com, “Drag and Drop” participants work from the Heritage Makers Web site to upload their photos, drag them into endless specialty backgrounds, dabble with 22,000 scrapbooking elements, write captions and eventually submit their project for professional publishing. For $35 to $70, the final result is a high-quality, self-customized storybook.

“It’s a great gift idea – for graduation, a wedding … and it’s such a good quality finished product that you’ll have forever,” Schroeder said.

The idea for Drag and Drop scrapbooking brewed in 2004 when professor Dr. Sharon Murdoch approached the now-president of Heritage Makers, Doug Cloward, about creating a unique direct-sales company to help people tell their stories.

“This is the cutting edge way to preserve people’s history,” said Rhonda Gustafson, an Oshkosh consultant who introduced the area to the art.

“To either get your pictures out of your shoe box or out of your computer’s hard drive, to be looked at and enjoyed for generations and generations … I have not shown a book to anyone who wasn’t just blown away by it.”

Sarah Owen: (920) 426-6671 or sowen2@thenorthwestern.com.

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