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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| Pasted by cheating scandal, champion scrapbooker's career in pieces |
| 2008-01-15 |
| Before the Internet bullies bashed her and judges revoked her title in the scrapbooking Hall of Fame, Kristina Contes basked in a reputation built on making pages dedicated to her designer handbags, her Converse sneakers and the word "dude." She showcased her avant-garde designs on websites like ScrapInStyleTV.com, traveled the country teaching classes, and turned down offers to go to Paris, London and Norway. "It's kind of like being a rock star," Contes said. "It's not what you think scrapbooking is." A growing legion of 20-something scrapbookers -- with Contes as their pinup -- discovered one another online and bonded over pages that immortalized Coldplay lyrics and honored the Heineken bottle. . . . As popularity soared, scrapbooking -- in all its forms -- exploded into a $2.6-billion industry where enthusiasts young and old, conservative and radical, grudgingly put aside differences to compete in national contests, attend global conventions, build blogs, join chat rooms, create online portfolios, and view YouTube and other online instructional videos. In that world, Contes stood out. She created textures with vinyl and made patterns by dabbing bubble wrap in paint. She turned playing cards into mini-scrap pages, cut out curse words from cardboard, and laid out distressed fonts and fisheye photos. She started a blog, co-wrote a book and championed the world of scrapbookers -- until it turned on her. . . . The trouble in the land of foam stickers and glossy glitter glue all started in February, after Contes won a contest sponsored by one of the industry's most popular magazines, Creating Keepsakes. Her winning pages featured photos of her feet and her hairless terrier, Chloe. Her name went into the magazine's Hall of Fame and her work was published in a book of the top 2007 entries. But Contes -- inadvertently -- had cheated. Someone else had taken pictures that ended up in her portfolio. When Contes called Creating Keepsakes to request that her friend receive a photo credit, the staff member approved it without realizing she had broken an entry rule: Submissions had to be solely the contestant's work. The book came out in October with both names published -- to the dismay of thousands. Disgruntled scrapbookers besieged the Creating Keepsakes chat room threatening to cancel subscriptions, boycott and sue. Scrapbooking bloggers called it "Hall of Fame-Gate," naming it the top scrapbooking scandal of 2007. They compared it to the performance-enhancing-drug controversies involving major league baseball player Barry Bonds and Olympic track star Marion Jones. Someone wrote that Contes was as polarizing a figure as Martha Stewart. . . . Mortified and hurt, Contes stopped scrapbooking. . . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #1 "Hall of FAME-GATE" - I was thinking KODAK-GATE myself. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2008-01-15 19:19 |