E is for Scrapbooking with Ephemera

I enjoy making my scrapbook pages personal to me. Often that can mean adding ephemera. Ephemera are things you have collected that were meant for a short term purpose. The picture above has my tickets to hear Rabbi Shmuley. It was a special night and I wanted to keep the tickets. I sprayed them with an archival spray.

The ephemera I added to our China trip made the pages even more special.

Bowling, movie tickets , and a lunch stub made for a great birthday memory page.

I have added Disneyland maps, postcards, tickets to events, theatre programs, posters for events, ticket stubs, bumper stickers,. programs from my kids performances, greeting cards, report cards, money from foreign countries, etc. to my album pages. .

The concern I have when adding ephemera is, IS IT SAFE? I don’t want embellishments destroying my treasured pages. There are a few ways to deal with making sure the added items won’t harm the photos.

One way is to make your own ephemera pocket. This is a good idea if you have something two sided and you don’t want to adhere it to the page. Directions are here. I also have acid free spray to make my items safe. Creative Memories also sells ephemera pockets you can add to a page. They also have pages with clear rows sectioned off. I have added greeting cards to those pages.

One of the easiest ways I have discovered to safely add ephemera to my pages is simply to photograph the item. That way, I can add it without concern. This especially works if I have something thick that I want to add to my page.

When I returned from New Zealand in 2001, I brought back some paper money. I gave a scrapbooking store my bills and they shrunk them and put 20 or so on a sheet for me to use as decorations. They gave me the money back, and then used the embellishments on some of their sample pages.