Get easy ideas to preserve your family memories and history with our scrapbooking guide.

We sent a never-scrapbooked-before Kaboose mom on a mission: Tell us what the big deal is. She had to come back with one layout done and all the techniques to do more. Here’s what she found out:

The assignment comes from Kaboose just in time. I have accepted the double dog dare to learn about scrapbooking through hands-on experience, of which I have none. But I’m the perfect candidate: my photographer husband and I have hundreds of pictures of our daughters, age seven and five, all of which are currently stuffed into boxes precariously stacked in a basement closet below the stairs. Retrieving some of these pictures for this assignment results in a Zaboomafoo-like moment when boxes begin tumbling down around me. Did I mention this assignment has come just in time?

Several hours—and plenty of sorting—later, I scan my yellow pages for scrapbooking help. I find it at Urban Scrapyard, a scrapbooking store near me in Toronto, Canada. Store owner Angela Urbano signs me up for a techniques course: “Pick a story to tell and bring in pictures to help you tell it,” she says.

How about the story of a mother getting beaned in the head by a shoe box of pictures? To avoid any more uncomfortable situations, I decide to learn as much as possible about scrapbooking before heading to the workshop. First, I visit the scrapbooking site, TwoPeasInABucket.com.

I browse the message boards and read up a bit, getting a clearer idea about the definition of scrapbooking: it’s the creation of layouts and albums that mark special memories of people, places, and things. More than simply placing pictures in a photo album, scrapbooking tells a story of a moment in time through the use of pictures, embellishments and, sometimes, words.

Next, to find out more, I arrange to speak with Two Peas founder, Kristina Nicolai-White. Here’s what I learned.