Time magazine called it the "Decade From Hell," 10 years marked by terrorism, natural disasters, two recessions, endless political and sex scandals, war, neglect, greed, self-interest and deferral of responsibility.

"Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post-World War II era," the magazine proclaimed.

For a less jaded and more personal view of the decade, I recommend "Documenting the Decade," a New York Times photo essay. The Times asked readers for photos from the past 10 years that illustrate what they considered important moments "in news, politics, culture, entertainment, business, sports and technology." The paper published 885 of the 2,769 submissions. Plenty of them point to the decade's darker side -- melting glaciers, unemployment lines and school shootings. But readers also submitted remarkable images that captured moments more impressionistic than newsworthy -- a wedding, a graduation, a birth, a brother just before he heads to war.

In other words -- the stuff of scrapbooks.

For those of us devoted to memory preservation, the first 10 years of the century will go down as the glory years.

Scrapbooking sales in 1996 were about $200 million, but grew to $1.4 billion in 2001, $2 billion in 2002, $2.5 billion in 2003, and have remained steady ever since. Somewhere between 16 and 25 percent of U.S. households include a scrapbooker. And, as the birthplace of modern scrapbooking, Utah has played a huge role in fueling the phenomenon.

Many of industry's most influential publishers and manufacturers are headquartered here or were before they were sold or merged or snuffed out by the recession. Companies such as All My Memories, American Crafts, BasicGrey, BoBunny Press, Close to My Heart, Creating Keepsakes, Daisy D's, Karen Foster Design, Making Memories, My Mind's Eye, Northridge Media, Pebbles Inc., Provo Craft, Reminisce, Rusty Pickle, Scenic Route, SEI, Stampin' Up!, We R Memory Keepers, and too many others to mention.

With that growth has come incredible innovation and transformation.

From digital cameras and computerized cutting systems to altered books and acrylic stamps, scrapbooking has evolved from a quaint past-time into a sophisticated art form.

Attitudes have changed, too.

Earlier in the decade, if someone "lifted" ideas from another designer they would be accused of plagiarism, says Kelly Mooney, a publicist for Making Memories. "Now, whether it's through idea books, Web sites, or group crops, everyone is willing and even honored to have their designs borrowed and re-created by the masses. And therefore, the art form has become more approachable to beginners."

Likewise, pre-packaged page kits have allowed manufacturers to tap into a group of consumers who don't have the time or inclination to take their scrapbooking to the artistic level of many devotees, Mooney says.

While the industry strove to lure new customers, it also launched or remade the careers of thousands of women -- designers, crafters, business owners and bloggers -- making celebrities out of many of them. And the rise of social media provided craft enthusiasts of all levels a powerful place to connect, swap ideas and show off our creations.

Technology has not only transformed the way scrapbookers interact, it's changed the way we scrap. More than 94 percent of all scrapbookers have a personal computer at home with access to the Internet, according to a study conducted by scrapbooking.com. Nearly 73 percent of those surveyed have purchased supplies online. And thanks to the advancements in digital scrapbooking, an increasing percentage of those "supplies" are simply downloaded.

The digital evolution has allowed scrapbooking to take root in some unlikely places.

Holly May Takatsuka. a native of Aurora, Colo., lives in West Tokyo. She started paper scrapping 10 years ago, "before scrapbooking was even heard of in Japan."

"There were no scrapbooking suppliers so I ended up buying all my supplies from American online shops, but shipping costs were so expensive. I discovered digital scrapbooking about a year later and used my downloaded supplies to make hybrid pages. After I learned how to use Photoshop Elements, I went completely digital," says Takatsuka, who scrapbooks pages for her niece in Vernal. "If it weren't for digital scrapbook supplies, I think I would have given it all up years ago."

Even die-hard paper scrappers are being tempted by digital, some out of curiosity and others out of necessity. Former Salt Lake Tribune columnist Rebecca Walsh is among the latter. She moved to Florence, Italy, last summer, taking with her a five-inch stack of 12x12 paper, thinking it would last two years.

"Italian scrapbooks are lovely. Thick, creamy sheets of bound cotton paper. But that only works for the most minimal, black-and-white photo spreads. Otherwise, you end up with a book that is 10 inches thick on one side and two inches thick at the binding. Plus, the books are $75," she says.

"This may force me to do more digital scrapbooking, something I've avoided until now because I liked how tactile old-school scrapbooks are."

Meanwhile, she's saving wine labels and copies of the English-language newspaper, The Florentine. Once a journalist, always a journalist.

And yet the next two years of Rebecca's life won't be defined by the headlines in an Italian newspaper, any more than the last decade was characterized only by towers falling, levies breaking, soldiers dying and banks failing.

She's keeping a blog of her time abroad so her 6-year-old son Jack can remember "what we were thinking and talking about."

In other words, the stuff of scrapbooks.

E-mail Linda Fantin at scrapbooking@sltrib.com.