With pieces of paper, photographs, mementos, stickers, flowers and glue sticks, about a half a dozen women were cataloging their memories this week at the American Legion Post 104. The Post hosted a Scrapbook Crop, a follow-up to a scrapbooking class held previously for those interested in learning the craft.

There were a few who have several years scrapbooking experience under their belt, while a couple were trying it for the first time. Hilda Hickman, the ring leader of the bunch, was on hand for a word of advice, encouragement or a quick tutorial in how to best frame a photo.

Julie Varner was creating a patriotic-themed page. Barbara Ingle was preserving a memories about her grandchildren with a photograph of her grandson Steven’s pouting face after another child pulled his books out. Verna Finwick was working on pages for her 25th wedding anniversary trip to Hawaii made 28 years ago. Norma Cate was working on her first pages, preserving memories that remind her of her dad.

Ingle said she began collecting the scrapbook supplies years before she actually began putting them to use.

“My place looks like a store,” she said of her piles of supplies. “I haven’t done very much. I made my girls one for their birthdays of them when they were little, things they’ve done and all that.”

She said enjoys the scrapbooking process much more than simply sliding photographs in between plastic sheets of a photo album.

“I enjoy this more,” she said. “I had one (child) who was born in Germany, so I had saw paper back there where it said Germany and I used that kind of paper in the background. And then I put her picture and the ship we sailed on and all that.”

Varner’s project was to commemorate a trip to Revolutionary War Trail, but previous pages have also documented other events, like a 2007 auto accident she and her husband were involved in. That page included pictures of wrecked vehicle, backed by copies of their emergency room bills.

Ingle didn’t think that was odd.

“Doing this makes you think to keep stuff like that,” she said. “I have a picture of a car when my husband had a wreck in Germany.”

Varner has photos set aside in the sleeves of her scrapbook pages, waiting until she’s ready to start on that section.

Cate was working with a photograph on an old truck on the side of the road, a with its branches cleared of leaves and a photo of her dad’s barn.

“This all reminds me of Dad,” she said.

Finwick started scrapbooking about five years ago. “I got so excited about getting supplies that after spending about $2,000 my husband said, ‘Don’t you think you ought to do an album?’” she said.

Along with albums, she makes greeting cards and silk flowers to go in her albums. When she goes on trips — like the one she and her husband took o Alaska for their 50th wedding anniversary — Finwick said she always looks for things she can use in her scrabooking.

“I look for postcards,” she said. “It was amazing, on the ship, they had a scrapbook section where they had the stickers or the words and pictures.” She said she also found scrapbook sections in shops in every town they visited. She’ll also keep menus and takes “a million pictures” to find the best ones for the books.

Finwick is quick to share tips and tricks she’s learned and loves to learn new ones from others. With the group a the American Legion, she showed them how to keep brochures on their pages by creating a slit in the plastic sleeving. She also recently learned how to creating a folding photo album that expands and folds back up onto the page.

A new style of paper she found lets scrapbookers create a mosaic out of their pictures, cutting them into 1-inch squares and piecing them together on the outlined squares of the paper. “The clue is you always make sure the face is in one square,” she said, offering a tip.

Hickman said the classes for scrapbooking and other crafts are relatively new at the American Legion. For scrapbooking, they held a class and then the crop, so they can practice what they learned in the class.

“I furnish all the supplies so that they don’t have to buy a lot of stuff and then get it home and say, I don’t know what to do with this stuff,” Hickman said. “First time people don’t need to be buying all that stuff. They need to stick to buying paper and then decide if they really like it.”

The next crafting class at the American Legion will be on Feb. 8, teaching saw blade painting using oil pants. The class will be held from 10 a.m,-2 p.m., at the post located 403 W. Main, Sevierville. There is a $20 charge and supplies will be furnished. Register by calling 654-0479-or 933-0748