Gabriella Biancofiore

Since I was a child, I have always been in love with stories– reading them, writing them, sharing them.  So it was only natural for me to turn to scrapbooking as a means of recording my life.

Initially, my method of documenting meant cutting every photograph I owned into a circle or oval and plastering each picture with a word bubble sticker declaring: “Wild and crazy!” or “What did he say?” or identifying someone as the #1 something or other. I kept these photos in a magnetic album with those sticky background pages. You know the ones– if you repositioned the photograph one too many times, it would no longer adhere and fall out of your album.

Then one day, good friends of mine shared their scrapbooks with me, and I was completely hooked. I marveled at their paper choices for backgrounds, the full-sized photos, the perfect embellishments, the standout titles, and the journaling. The journaling always drew me in.

I fell in love with scrapbooking and this form of storytelling, and I’m still in love with it today, over 20 years later.

My style has changed over the years (thankfully), as has the format I use. The subjects of my pages have changed; some of those loved ones are gone forever while others have grown. However, what hasn’t changed is my family’s enjoyment at seeing themselves and events forever caught in my pages, and my joy and delight at this hobby.

So when I became part of the SCT team, it was a dream come true. I am working with people I have always admired, helping to polish already stellar writing, and being inspired with every page I edit. The only challenge is staying focused on the editing when all I want to do is pull out my scrapbook supplies and start creating.

In addition to being SCT’s copy editor, I’m a wife and mom living in a Chicago suburb with my husband, our 4 kids, and our crazy but devoted dog. My husband is both a carpenter and musician, my oldest daughter is in high school, my triplets (yes, triplets) are in middle school, and our dog (a smallish cavapoo) thinks he’s meant to terrorize every passerby and squirrel in the neighborhood. As you can imagine, it’s rarely ever quiet here, but I do manage to find time to read and scrap, so life is good.