LOST CITY — Many women have a collection of treasured family recipes, but Jill Steeley’s takes the family cookbook to a new level.

The first page, “Baking with Meemaw,” shows grandson Jason Steeley, now 5-1/2, when he was 27 months old, helping in the kitchen as he prepared, then enjoyed chocolate caramel cake.

The next page jumps to old photos of a dignified woman, Ethel Edwards, with the caption, “A grandmother – one of life’s greatest blessings.” It’s accompanied by her recipe for Edwards dressing, with another for dumplings on the following page.

“This is my grandmother Edwards, my daddy’s mother. This is the dressing she fixed. She didn’t use recipes, but this is as close as we could get,” Steeley said.

Her family cookbook is a scrapbook, one of a dozen or so she has compiled since she took up scrapbooking 12 years ago. She and a group of other scrapbook enthusiasts met Thursday afternoon and evening at the Lost City Community Center to practice their art and teach others. Several said they hope it will develop into a regular gathering.

Steeley turned the pages, showing her overall-clad grandfather, then other relatives.

“This is my cousin from Pawnee. She’s the artist among us, and you can always tell what pages are hers,” she said, explaining that she and the other women involved in the recipe scrapbook make five copies of each page.

Each will have an heirloom to pass down not only the treasured recipes, but photos and memories of the people involved.

Auntie Fran contributed her recipe for pepper relish, while the page for Steeley’s dad, Jack Edwards, features “Jack’s chili.” Edwards, who lived between 1915 and 1985, is depicted in a photo from his service with the U.S. Army Air Corps in England in 1944.

A little metal pineapple decorates the page with a recipe for pineapple icebox cake, while a plastic red apple adorns the one for grated apple pie (on apple print paper). The book goes on, with favorites such as pizza, cantaloupe mango soup, and a German apple pancake.

Over the past decade, scrapbooking – or “cropping,” as Steeley and her family call it– has come a long way from the days when people pasted down their Kodak photos in plain black albums, or laboriously fitted them into those little black corner tabs that always seemed unstuck.

Today’s scrappers make their preserved memories works of art, using appropriately themed background paper and little devices, such as tiny megaphones for a cheerleader page, pencils, blackboards or books to memorialize school days.

In many cities, scrapbook businesses have opened and one local enterprise, The Scrappin’ Pad, southwest of Tahlequah, is a bed and breakfast where women can gather for a weekend of scrapbooking.

Steeley created her first scrapbook for her mother’s 80th birthday.

“My sister had been to a Creative Memories workshop with her sorority. We thought it would be a good idea for my mom’s 80th birthday. So we got together and dug through some old pictures. The bug bit me,” she said.

Now four generations of her family – from her mother to her granddaughters – have developed a passion for “cropping.”

The scrapbooks not only create an attractive way to preserve photos and other things, but can be a valuable link for people in the future exploring their family trees.

Many people have boxes of old family photos they have inherited.

Now that Granny Sue or Uncle Joe has passed on, they aren’t sure who all the relatives depicted in the photos are. Steeley encourages them to keep the photos rather than throwing them away.

“It tells you a lot about the dress, the customs,” she said. “You can still scrap those because they’re all related to your family, even if you can’t put names and places on them.”

Some scrapbooks can be costly affairs, with plenty of fancy adornments. But for Steeley, creativity means more than how much something cost.

“You don’t have to have fancy things to scrap. These are toilet paper rolls flattened down, covered in paper, to put things in,” she said. “This is coffee filters. You can put little things in them, journal in it, put pictures in it, whatever.”

Haley Gibson, 16, a member of the fourth generation in the family to pursue scrapbooking, demonstrated how to make a small scrapbook page by folding together sheets of larger paper. She’s picked up many techniques to make her scrapbooks special.

She didn’t have the double-sided paper usually used for the folding technique, so she developed a way to do it using two types of paper.

After making the folded pages, she created a cover, then fastened all the pages together in a style similar to an accordion folder.

“It’s just fun,” she said of the hobby, then showed off some of her pages.

“This is my dog, Slinky. He died a little over a year ago. This is his page,” she said.

An adjacent page tells the sad story about how Slinky was run over, and they had to decide to put him to sleep.

Following pages were happier.

“This is my dog, Teddy Bear. [pictured with a teddy bear] This is me and my family. This is just us, being goofy,” she said.

Oleta Steeley admits she was somewhat reluctant to enter into the craft.

“I just wasn’t going to get into this, but then the bug bit me. It really is relaxing, and you can spend a lot of time doing it,” she said.

She’s alone now and has the ability to leave a project out on her dining room table, getting up in the night to work on it if she can’t sleep..

“I turned 85 years old, and it’s a real good job for an 85-year-old,” she said.

Renee Lewis has scrapped for about two years. Again, a family member inspired her.

“My mom got me into it. She lives up by Grove, and just got me started,” she said. “It’s something we can do together.”

Lewis works for the nutrition department at Muskogee Public Schools.

“I took a trip to Dallas, Texas, to our national conference. I’ve got a lot of pictures from that and I want to put them in a book to show the other ladies. Next year, our convention is in Tennessee, and I’d like to get more of them to come to it,” she said.

“I’m doing my grandchildren, I’m doing my garden. I’ve got three books going at once. If I get bored with one, I just stop and do another,” she said.

Garrett Gordon, 10, also is enjoying scrapping. He did a page with pictures of dogs, using multicolored paper.

“I cut my pictures in different shapes,” he said.

“Scrapping has no age limit,” Jill Steeley said.

“We want everyone to be addicted. Scrapbooking is like the modern day quilting bee, where women get together to express their creativity and visit.”

You’re invited

The group of women who met this week to scrapbook at the Lost City Community Center are interested in making it a regular event. If you’d like to join, or just learn more about scrapbooking, call Louise Gordon, (918) 772-3070.