The name of the game is Scrap-o – twenty five squares of Bingo fury, scrapbook-style. Instead of numbers and letters, the seven women in the room fill in the blank squares on their cards with words from a list of 200 related to scrapbooking. Shirley Coale is running the show, standing in the midst of eight white plastic tables of chaos. Each is stacked high with supplies: cardstock, plastic organizing containers of beads, brads and buttons, paper cutters, punches, rubber stamps, gel pens, Xacto knifes, and the occasional pair of highly specialized garden-sheer-like scissors. Shirley, a PhD in her fifties, peers over the heaped supplies at the women sitting at each table. Some stacks are so high that she can see only the woman’s head. “Whenever the mood hits you,” she tells them, “come up and draw words from the bag.”

Shirley makes sure that everyone is finished filling in their blank squares and calls out the first group of Scrap-o words, “Snaps, chalks, light box. Fabulous, paperkuts and soft tints.”

Most of the women get at least one on their game sheet, but few get any more. With a selection of possible words almost three times that of the 70 numbers in bingo, this is going to be a very long game.

The Scrap Divas of Oregon, however, do not mind. This is exactly why they’ve come to this Memorial Day Weekend retreat. The Scrap Divas are an internet community formed in 2002 that now boasts a membership of 80 women and two men with interest in the craft ranging from mild to fanatical. As the number of scrapbookers has steadily increased, a word-of-mouth network brought many women to the internet community. Others found the Divas while surfing the net. The Scrap Divas list is extremely active, with an average of 20 messages exchanged daily. But unlike most internet groups, the Divas are active in real life as well. They plan numerous retreats each year, invite other members to their houses to scrapbook, and hold a First Friday crop, a gathering for the purpose of scrapbooking, each month in Eugene.

Scrapbooking is the hobby of creating albums that present photos and keepsakes in an engaging way. Women, who comprise an overwhelming majority of scrapbookers, document their lives and the lives of their families. The supplies used for this hobby are extensive, with the layouts often overwhelming the actual items being presented.

As early as the 1700s, men and women collected quotes and “scraps” of ephemera from their lives and arranged them in volumes known as common-place books. The hobby grew, and luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain (who actually held a patent for a water-activated adhesive album) actively created scrapbooks. The modern from of archival-quality scrapbooking began in 1980 when a family in Utah opened a retail store selling acid-free scrapbooking supplies.

Scrapbooking has become more than a hobby; it’s now an obsession, a craft craze that has hooked hundreds of thousands of women and created a $2.5 billion industry. With this commercialization has come a certain amount of standardization. You can buy tools specifically designed for every conceivable scrapbooking task. You can buy paper, stickers, and embellishments for nearly every occasion. This has made the hobby more accessible to women, but also seems to have stifled their creativity. Originality is not necessary in the world of scrapbooking.

The Scrap Diva’s retreat is being held at a Girl Scout lodge at the end of a winding mountain road in the rural community of Jasper, Oregon. The building is surrounded by a thick growth of fir trees broken only by the gravel drive and a few trails into the woods. The interior is dominated by a cavernous fluorescent-lit room that serves as the cropping (scrapbooking) area and bedroom. On one end, sleeping bags, air mattresses, and cots line the wall; the other is overwhelmed by cropping tables arranged to keep eye contact and interaction high.

Despite the sometimes exotic locations of retreats, such as beach houses and mountain lodges, scrapbookers rarely take advantage of their environment. The Divas never consider walking the beautifully wooded trails around the lodge – as a matter of fact they almost never leave the building. They are utterly focused on their work.

Two more Divas, Jenn and Yvonne, both in their twenties, arrive at the Memorial Day retreat, bringing the number of scrapbookers to nine. The Divas were able to reserve the site because of a last-minute cancellation by another scrapbooking group, but the short turn-around limited the number of women who were able to come. Even with the new arrivals, the rest comment to each other about the low numbers. Paula, who she hosts karaoke at a local strip club and is a member of a nudist colony, seems a bit amazed, “This is the smallest group we’ve had at a retreat in years.”