During the year 1996 I was introduced to Scrapbooking and found it to be very interesting since I had my first grandchild due early in 1997. I started buying items at the local camera shop which had made a wall into a scrapbooking supplies area. Back then there was not much to offer in my area. At about the same time we purchased our first computer and one night I was on the internet looking for scrapbooking sites and came across a site that posted swaps. I was very interested in this because then I could see some of the items being offered in other areas of the US. So, I joined my first swap, I had a great time at it and thought it would be fun to start a site devoted to a club for scrapbooking. At the time I did this there were no other clubs for this. I built the site and within 1 day I had two scrapals. I assigned them each other and we were off and running. The club grew very quickly and the girls wanted a way to be able to talk to each other as a group so I founded the scrapals mailing list, which has now grown to 7 different lists for different areas of interest within our club.
We keep our group at approx. 125 members because we are a very close group, unlike other larger lists we are family and share most anything with each other. When there are openings we welcome new Scrapals with open arms and if they jump right in they find that they are part of group very quickly.
It is strange now to look back at when I started this group and look at what it has grown to today but, it is one thing in my life that I am very proud up and very happy I did!!!
angie gates
scrapals founder