my love of scrapbooking: ephemera
I have always enjoyed collected ephemera, it is part of being a creative, visual person. I have shed a lot of this material over many years, but some things have been hard to part with. It could be a postcard from a friend, exhibition material, a bag I have liked, business cards, stamps, tickets, doodles, food labels, receipts: the list is endless. Some of these things found their way in to sketchbooks and diaries and some were on walls and pinboards for many years.
About 25 years ago I decided these treasures needed housing, so I bought a 21cm x 21cm spiral bound book from paperchase and stuck all of them in there. I continued adding to it until it was full. This has the items from when I was at art college right up to the late 1990s.
I continued for a few years without another scrap book, amassing more ephemera which lived in random places, boxes, and various attempts to categorise it and keep it under control. I eventually bought another scrapbook: This time I went large: an A3 brown craft paper spiral bound scrapbook from Paperchase. I started by carefully sticking things in that I collected from galleries, greetings cards I liked etc, but as the pages filled, I realised it was quite sterile. I went back to the random boxes of uncategorizable stuff and I filled up as many of the spaces as I could with anything I had collected: all the uncatagorisable things and stuff that didn’t make much sense. Suddenly it was so much more interesting!
Weird combinations of things happened, and I tried to make pages that would not reveal their contents at one glance. I could still add more things into that first book if needed, but I eventually started a second one as it was getting quite unwieldy and pretty heavy. I have a shelf by my desk now, where I put anything that will feed my scrapbook, then when I have amassed enough material, I have a wild sticking session and see how much I can fit into a space, often utilising flaps and page extensions. Definitely a case of horror vacuii!
Everything goes into the scrapbook now: exhibition materials, family memorabilia, everything! I am not careful with how I stick things in, it is not a precious book. If something is prized I will make an insert so it can be removed, but most things are stuck down good and proper with PVA glue. I have found out from looking back at past sketchbooks, that sellotape and double-sided tape are not good long term options and many things now lay loosely-contained in their closed pages.
So here I am, the owner of 3 scrapbooks of joy, full of memories, visual inspiration, laughs and aides-mémoire which take up surprisingly little space considering what is contained within them. I am quite a messy and intuitive scrapbooker, there are many ways of doing it. Whichever way it is approached, it is a very enjoyable process.