by Betty Tesh

Created on: January 22, 2009   Last Updated: April 19, 2009

The true scrap booking enthusiast may have an entire room filled with papers, punches, pictures and pens, but they're always delighted to get one more of anything practical: acid-free pens, stencils, stickers, card stock, paper cutters, decorative scissors. The reason they're delighted is that once they've used a particular stencil or punch or ribbon, their creativity longs for something different. Don't worry that you may be giving them just another page of peony stickers, if you're buying those peonies this week, the sheet she bought two weeks ago is entirely different.

If you're shopping in a store devoted to scrap booking, you may want to ask the sales staff what the latest thing is. It may be a new kind of ribbon, a new glue pen, a device for crinkling paper. If your scrap booking friend has beaten you to it, keep the receipt so she can replace it with the latest, latest thing. Almost everything you will find in a scrap booking store is considered a necessary tool of the trade, and a scrap booking enthusiast loves nothing more than diversity in her tools.

A different kind of gift-one that requires more than a trip to the scrapbook store-is the "Scrounged Gift." Scrap bookers are always in the market for memento-type materials: a matchbook cover from a defunct nightclub, a business card from her grandfather, a strand from her cheerleading pom-pom, the masthead from a copy of Saturday Evening Post, dated the year she was born, the front page of the owner's manual for her first car. Don't worry if your "found object" isn't acid-free (you've heard her talk enough to know that "acid-free" is her mantra), she has ways to segregate these acid-filled little scraps on her pages. The secret is to make it personal.

A final gift idea is a photograph from your own vault. Perhaps you have one of your scrap booking friend from elementary school, or from the days you strolled your babies around the park. My best friend sent me a "brownie" photograph (for you younger readers, a "brownie" was a camera that came way, way before digital cameras), of my grandmother on a church picnic in early 1950. I treasured it enough to devote an entire two-page spread in my scrapbook to the gift.

When gifting a scrapbooker, remember that they are dedicated to making a "precious moment" out of every event. One of my scrapbooking friends seven-year-old son broke his ankle while playing soccer. As he was being stretchered off the field, he looked up at her and whispered through his tears, "I guess this will make a good page in the scrapbook, won't it, Mom?" So, whether your gift is a box of stick-down photo corners or a copy of her Great-Aunt Matilda's birth certificate, she'll love it!

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