Sick of Sticky Adhesives….

I think it was probably someone in the adhesive manufacturing business that invented the term “acid free” in order to put all those magnetic page photo album companies out of business.

Like most people probably, I had never heard the term “acid free” until about fifteen years or so ago. It wasn’t until I took my first scrapbooking class sometime in the mid 90’s that I was fully versed in the pitfalls of using non acid free products. The instructor warned us that those magnetic pages would eventually yellow slowly destroying both the page and everything on it. I didn’t believe her at the time, but looking back through old albums today, she definitely knew what she was talking about.

As a result, I no longer buy those, and they’re becoming slightly harder to find. Now you either go the slip in route (pages with pre-sized sleeves where you slide in your photo to store it) or get really creative and do “scrapbooking.”

I do a little of each depending on how much time and creative impulse I have. Sometimes I even manage to combine the two by adding a sticker or other embellishment to the slip in albums.

Whenever I do scrapbooking, I can’t help but wonder how many hours would be saved if I could simply just lay out everything on the page and then pull the clear sheet over it and go on to the next page. Yes, you can buy clear sticky sheets to lay over your pages, but unless you’ve somewhat secured everything down, static cling will sometimes cause the various elements to be pulled on to the sticky sheet thus disrupting your whole page arrangement.

I know adhesive manufacturers are trying to do everything in their power to make this process easier from manufacturing glue dots, to small sticky squares to spray-on adhesive. However, at the end of the day, it’s still more expensive and time consuming to have to glue down every element of your creative scrapbooking pages. This is what takes all the fun out of it for me. I shudder to think how much I have spent on these various adhesives, never buying enough and running out halfway through a project. No, I’m not ready to resort to ‘digital scrapbooking yet,’ but will continue on my quest to find a cheaper and more effective product to help facilitate this niggling little detail of scrapbooking.