18 Days and counting...

Well, according to the "Days Until" application on my iPod, there are only 18 days left until Scrapbook Island closes its doors forever. I can hardly believe that it has been 5 1/2 years since that day that my mom told me that she was buying the dinky little store that I worked for in high school. All throughout college, my friends thought I was crazy for going home every weekend to work at a store for a hobby they had almost never heard of! I was always the weird one because for the longest time, I was the youngest person I knew that took scrapbooking so seriously. No one else was nutty enough to spend the kind of money and time that I did on such a hobby.


It seems like I've been destined to work in the scrapbook industry since I was a kid. My mom took me to a Creative Memories party when I was about 11 and its been downhill ever since! After that, it was just something that Mom and I did together. But then when I was 15, new scrapbook stores opened up, about a mile from our house, and not even a block away from my high school. They didn't hire me right away, but Mom started teaching beginners' classes (and pop-ups, too) for them and they watched me as I assisted her. And by Mid-Winter Break (February vacation) 2001, I was their part-time shop girl! The store was called Simple Pleasures Scrapbook Treasures. It was owned by a mother and her two daughters, Sharon, Denise, and Tammy. They taught Mom and me sooooo much about the industry. I worked for them until we moved to New Hampshire in the fall of 2002.

Once we moved to NH... I was going through slight withdrawals of not seeing the new products that were introduced, firsthand! Sooooo after being in NH for 2 months, I went into the local scrapbook store, Scrapbooks, Stamps, & Stickers and sought a new job! Annnnnd I was hired, because, honestly... how many teenagers would have already had the experience I did and want to work at a dinky little place like that was, unless they were already obsessed with the hobby like I was? Funny side story... my aunt had been buying me presents from that store for years when she lived in Londonderry! And I'd actually shopped there a couple times when I was younger because we would come up to NH to visit when we lived in Rhode Island. It's really wild when you think about the history we had in this area before actually becoming embedded in it... Welll, back to the story, I actually quit working there 5 or so months later because I was becoming really involved at school and the hours that SSS were so limited that it became impossible to do both. Besides, for the most part, it was such a small store, with very little traffic, that I spent the majority of my time there chatting on AIM... shhhhh.... don't tell!!!

However, it seems like it was just meant to be, because after I was at Plymouth State for about a year and working at Charlotte Russe in the Mall of NH… my Mom calls to tell me that SSS was for sale… and she was in there (just by coincidence) when Marge was talking about needing a buyer… and she so eagerly raised her hand and said, “I’ll buy it!” With barely a moment’s hesitation, our family’s lives were to be changed drastically for the next 5 years...

And so the story begins where many of you know it…. I quit my job at Charlotte Russe, and on December 1st, 2004, Scrapbook Island was born… After many trials and tests, we made it through to our official opening day, January 5th, 2005 and we’ve been forever changed since. We have been beyond blessed to meet many wonderful people who have become part of our lives and will be there with no end in sight, despite the fact that the Island will be no more.