New Finds in My Old Collections

Now that I've relocated for the winter in the truest of snowbird style, quite literally following the cranes that fly over our Alaskan property to sunny Arizona, I've gotten to revisit my old stashes of ephemera and supplies. I had to split my collections so that I would have materials at my fingertips at each of my homes and studios.

There's a thrift store here that usually has some obscure usable paper goods. this time it was years of the publication "The Workbasket", a periodical of needle arts. Largely discarding the patterns for outdated tatting, crocheting and knitting, I'm choosing to use the wonderful advertising images to affix to some nicely smoothed flat bamboo beads that were once part of a placemat.

In addition to my old stashes, my brother just sent me a whole collection of his own travel ephemera and images from fireworks boxes, matchboxes and other packaging with great images from his travels to Bali, Mexico and points in between  from over 30 years ago. (And he has great taste in these things)

My mother had allowed me to go through some of her mother's old picture albums to sort. I was making a new archival album since the old one was beginning to age and disintegrate. She admitted that some of the folks in the album meant nothing to her, therefore I was free to appropriate them to myself and my own purposes.