The soft crinkle of patterned paper, the scratch of scissors, and the gentle hum of conversations fill room 113 as students gather around tables covered with stickers, magazines, buttons, and glue. Focused on creativity and self-expression, Brea Olinda High School’s Scrapbooking Club provides students a space to assemble pages where photos, quotes, and doodles swirl together.
The club, founded in 2025 by Jess Vargas (‘26), allows students an environment to unwind, explore emotions, process stress, and create.
“I enjoy scrapbooking as a coping mechanism, and I wanted a creative space for people to be able to express themselves,” Vargas said. Vargas’s notebook — just one of many of her volumes of scrapbooking — is full of wax stamps, stickers, and pictures from Polaroid cameras.
At the club’s Jan. 28 meeting, students moved between tables flipping through piles of comic books and magazines, selecting images to add to their collages. Members leaned over a bag of buttons, seeking pieces that fit their designs, in layouts ranging from layered tapestries of mixed media to cleaner pages framed with washi tape.
For the club’s members, this bi-weekly lunchtime activity is a refuge.
“I love how scrapbooking lets me slow down and focus on something other than school,” club member Olivia Seol (‘27) said. Her notebook of carefully cut-out images paired with handwritten blurbs features her favorite characters – Pompompurin, Shinku Konco, and Misuri Kanriji.
Small details like choosing a sticker and carefully cutting out a shape for a carefully arranged page help students slow down and focus.
“[Scapbooking Club] helps me relax from all the stress from my school and personal life,” Yuritzia Hernandez Roque (‘27), club member, said. “It also brings my friends and I closer.”
As students work side-by-side, they swap supplies, compare pages in progress, and talk through design ideas, creating a relaxed space where creativity and connection develop naturally.
Vargas ensures the club meetings are stocked with donated supplies collected from teachers, family, and friends. The materials provide students access to a wide range of papers, stickers, and adornments to experiment with. Beyond the meetings, members continue working on their pages at home to document memories and celebrate their favorite things.
“I see scrapbooking as a great way to express yourself whether it’s for being creative or processing trauma,” Vargas said. “I hope with my club it’s been helping people feel safe and equal to others.”
That sense of safety is backed by broader research linking creative outlets to a person’s emotional well-being. Adults who rate their mental health as “very good” or “excellent” are significantly more likely to regularly engage in creative activities more frequently than those that reported good or fair or poor mental health.
By supplying material and encouraging individual experimentation, Vargas will continue to run Scrapbooking Club as a space for students to record meaningful moments, develop creative skills, and connect with peers through the shared process of making something by both hand, and imagination.
