By Deb Peterson | Photographed by Deb Peterson
More than three years ago, Cathy Sullivant showed up at Changes, Adam Welch’s hair salon in Mountain Home, with a basket full of goodies. There was nothing very expensive in it—chocolate chip cookies, Butterfinger candy bars, white cake with buttercream frosting, vanilla ice cream, a couple bottles of Dr. Pepper.
“To this day, it’s the most special gift I’ve ever received,” Adam says.
It took him a while to realize that it was all the stuff he had put in an email to Cathy months before when he answered a quiz she sent out to friends.
“It felt like a spam email,” Adam remembers, “but I did it anyway because it was Cathy.”
And then he forgot all about it.
But Cathy didn’t.
She sent that email to most of her friends, and created a Friendship scrapbook with one page for each friend that lists that person’s favorite color, candy, soda, food, restaurant, ice cream, cake, dessert, music/band, perfume, hobby, cookies, and flower.
For birthdays or special occasions, or when she knows a friend is sitting vigil in the hospital, or “just for a happy,” Cathy gets out her Friendship scrapbook, checks the friend’s page, and puts a goodie basket together.
“Nobody does stuff like that,” Adam says. “It was such a special gift—surprising, fun, just amazing.”
Cathy’s Friendship book is just one of the many, many scrapbooks she has created to remember life with husband John and their two children, Lauren, 25, and Seth, 19. She has books full of vacation memories, and books for special occasions and achievements, like Seth’s book commemorating the year his Mountain Home Bombers team won the state golf championship.
“I think he’ll be really proud when he can pull out his state golf championship book someday to show his son,” Cathy says.
Each member of the family has a book in progress that Cathy adds to as she comes across photos and other memorabilia.
“They don’t have to be in order,” she says. “Your memories are not in order. You don’t remember life in order. I have pictures from high school that I still haven’t scrapped.”
Scrapping. That’s what Cathy calls it when she heads upstairs to her studio, a former guest room turned workshop.
“It’s so relaxing for me, kind of like my own little retreat,” Cathy says. “I come up here away from it all and I get just get lost. I’m so focused that time flies.”
There is plenty in the studio to keep her busy. It’s a scrapper’s paradise, jam-packed with everything a scrapper could dream of wanting. And not one thing is out of place.
“I am really organized,” Cathy says.
Boy, is she.
Every square foot of the room and its walkin closet has a purpose. Every little thing has a place and is color-coordinated. Shoeholders hang on every door and are filled with various items she can see at a glance.
She organizes with an old card catalog, clear bins, spools, baskets, and shelving. Her studio has two computers, a television, and a sewing machine.
“I can’t sew at all,” Cathy says. “I sew straight lines on scrapbook paper.”
Looking through her gorgeous fabric-covered books, it’s hard to believe there is anything she can’t do, but beauty is only part of what draws this woman to scrapping.
“People want to document their lives and their memories,” she says. “Scrapbooking is like living genealogy. Even blogging is a form of scrapbooking. It’s memory keeping.”
She picks up treasures everywhere she goes for use in her studio. She takes classes online to learn new techniques.
“My goal is to be a better photographer,” she says.
Every year, Cathy puts her photos on DVDs, labels them, and stores them in a lock box.
“Don’t leave them in your phone or computer,” she warns. “They’ll be gone when the phone or computer dies. There could be a whole generation of lost photos.”
Almost everyone has boxes of old photos, Cathy says. If we stop printing photos, there will be no more boxes of photos, nothing to hold and look at.
The people for whom she makes scrapbooks and gift baskets understand the power of Cathy’s passion for memories.
“It was so meaningful,” Adam says of his gift from Cathy. “She was interested enough to want to know about me.”
M! April/May 2012
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