My imaginary contribution to The Paperclipping Roundtable

One goal of the contest was to pick an ordinary (non-industry) scrapbooker. I definitely fit that bill.

So, cia, how did you get started in scrapbooking?
I used to make scrapbooks for my Barbies. Yes, you heard that right. I thought the Barbie magazine was one of the coolest things I had ever seen - all the Barbies arranged to look like they were living a real life, down to the straws in their drinks and half-eaten food. So I used to try my hand at doing something similar. I'd arrange my Barbies all life-like and take pictures of them, and then put the pictures in those old magnetic page albums. My most memorable one was when Barbie and the Rockers hit the beach.

But I think I really started when I decided to do a honeymoon scrapbook. My husband and I traveled through South America for two months on our honeymoon, and I saved everything with the intent of doing a scrapbook when we got back. It's been almost 5 years, and I am still working on that album! When I realized it was taking forever to finish this album, I thought my problem was that I was uninspired. So I started taking classes at Archiver's, and reading the magazines, and then following Ali Edwards' blog, and then I took a class with her at Big Picture Scrapbooking, and well, here I am today, still working on that honeymoon album, but also doing a lot more pages about other trips and my everyday life.

And what do you do when you are not scrapbooking? I am a graduate student in Linguistics.
Izzy says, "linguistics. What is that exactly?"
[I get asked that a lot and I like to change up my answer every now and then, so this is what I came up with for the show.]
Just like botanists study plants and geologists study rocks, linguists study language. We look at the pieces of language - sounds, prefixes, suffixes, words, sentences - as our objects of study. But unlike plants and rocks, language is a human invention. So linguistics has sociology, psychology, and some biology wrapped up in it as well, since we study how people use language as well as how language is built up.

Noell: Interesting. Now what are you thinking to do with that once you are done with graduate school?

...

Izzy: Did we lose her?