Savanna Women's Club sponsors first annual Scrapbooking Crop
The Journal-Standard By Tony Carton
For four generations, popcorn has been the entrée of choice at the Sunday evening meal for Karen Hoffman's family in rural Savanna. Hoffman says it all started when her great-grandparents would come in from a long day in the fields and instead of cooking a big meal, would pop large batches of corn, sit down, and make a meal of“My great-grandfather would have his with milk and sugar,” she recalled. “My dad still comes over occasionally on Sunday and I have pictures of him and my three-year-old sitting on the couch together, eating popcorn.
She is a scrapbooker, and says she will take those and other pictures of family members enjoying their traditional Sunday popcorn, journal the whole story, and preserve those memories for her children.
“I want the kids to know why they eat popcorn with grandpa on Sunday night,” she said. “To me, passing on the story behind the story is what scrapbooking is about.”
Hoffman is the chairperson of the Savanna Women's Club first annual Scrapbooking Crop, a fundraiser for the club's scholarship fund.
She says a crop is the equivalent of an old fashioned quilting bee except the participants are scrapbooking instead of quilting.
“This is an opportunity to get together, work on our scrapbooking projects and swap decorative items and ideas,” she said. “We'll have consultants there from the Close to My Heart, Creative Memories, and Picture Perfect companies giving demonstrations and offering tips and inspiration, so if someone is just getting started there will be someone there to help them.”
Hoffman says to help assure that it will be a full day of scrapbooking fun the women's club will serve submarine sandwiches for lunch, pizza for supper, sundaes for an evening snack and desserts and munchies throughout the day. There will also be hourly door prizes and a grand prize drawing for three nights at the Radisson Hotel in Moline as well as games and contests.
“There's only one thing better than scrapbooking,” Hoffman said, laughing. “That's eating.”
She says that the phrase, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is never truer than in scrapbooking.
“There is all ranges of scrapbookers,” she explained. “There are the very elaborate scrapbookers that maybe have one picture on a very fancy page and then there are those that are plain and simple with just pictures and a little bit of the story behind them, and of course, there are those like me, that fall in between.”
She cites her current Thanksgiving project as an example of scrapbooking's potential.
“At our family dinner, we went around the table and everyone said what they are thankful for,” she said. “I have pictures of each of us and I'm converting our comments to text. I will combine everything with a decorative background to make a Thanksgiving page. It's a collection of our best memories.”
Marla O'Neill is president of the Savanna Women's Club. She said that 2006 marked the 60th year of community service for her group.
“We have a couple projects that we do annually and we always add a few of those projects that seem to just pop up,” she said. “One of our mainstays is an effort to provide books for the Savanna Children's Fund.She said that area churches operate the Savanna Children's Fund, and one of their activities is to provide Christmas gifts for families in need.
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