DIY Tape!

Most everyone who keeps an art journal, makes cards, or creates scrapbooks is familiar with the current “tape craze,” I think—washi tape, fabric tape, colorful electrical tape, even decorative Duck tape. I’m usually the last one on the bandwagon, but tapes are definitely interesting me, and I have a tiny beginner’s supply of my own:

Last week I came across a great tutorial by Julie Balzer about making your own book page tape. I have been using discarded books for some other projects, so it was very easy to pick one up (The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, to be exact), and give the tape project a try.

All I had to do to make the tape, as Julie clearly explains, is put some Scotch tape down on a page of text, rub it with my finger, and pull it up again. You basically pull up the top layer from the page, so the letters from the text adhere to your tape.

Julie mentions that she likes the opacity of her tape. I, on the other hand, was into a little more transparency, so I soaked the tapes in a little bowl of water and used the pad of my finger to rub off some more of the paper pulp from the back. (If you get too aggressive, or get impatient and use a fingernail, you will scrape the text right back off your tape.)

She recommended using a Xyron sticker machine to bring back its adhesiveness, but my tape seemed to keep its stickiness pretty well.

I haven’t used the tape in any projects yet, except to include it on an envelope I sent to my PiF recipient for the 2nd anniversary of WOYWW:

I love Julie’s ingenuity in creating this approach to making book tape, and am looking forward to trying different types of book pages to see if I can get any colors or images to adhere, as well as text.

I am a HUGE fan of clear contact paper transfers (a topic for another post!), so I imagine I could make a transfer of ANY image, and then cut it into strips to make a tape “effect.”

I have been watching how other folks use their tapes in the art journal spreads because so far I haven’t been inspired to use them in mine. I’ll just keep building up my supply, and wait for inspiration to strike!

If you have a journal spread using tapes that you would like to share, I’d love for you to include a link in the comments!

Happy taping!

The Great Yard Sale of 2011

I love yard sales. I’m one of those who are likely to veer sharply into an unexpected turn to follow a yard sale sign.

Happily, my husband enjoys sales as much as I do. Some Saturday mornings, we drive around the area looking for places to stop so we can sift through other people’s cast-offs. We discuss and critique sign design and placement. (Why do so many people think the words “yard sale” are more important than the street address? I can guess it’s a yard sale; it’s the address I need to see from my moving car!)

It’s almost as much fun to have a yard sale of our own. Since we moved into our house six years ago, we’ve already had three!

We’re not sure how we manage to amass enough for a sale every couple of years. But every year we watch “stuff” creep across the basement floor, making it harder and harder to navigate through our storage space. When all pathways are blocked, we know it’s time for a sale!

We could not have ordered a more gorgeous day off the menu than Saturday! Sunny, mid-70s, with a gentle breeze. Our sale was meant to begin at 9 a.m. and run until 3 p.m. As always, shoppers turned up around 7:30 am, before we even had most of our things onto the driveway. Every time we’ve done one of these, we’ve made most of our money before our posted start time!

We weren’t trying to make the big bucks off the sale, only clear out the basement and get rid of things we weren’t ever going to use. I felt gratified any time a baby item went to a young couple with an infant in tow, or (for example) when a young man in his high school uniform shirt bought the $10 microwave, and I could imagine him putting it in his college dorm room in the fall.

At the same time, it makes me a little sick to my stomach to think of how much money we spent on certain items, only to see them resold at a tiny fraction of the price—a double-stroller goes for $20, an entire set of dishes for $25, a Baby Bjorn baby carrier goes for $5, an antique dining room table goes for $10.

Clearly some things got plenty of use, and our needs just changed over time, as the girls got bigger and no longer needed their baby equipment. But other things probably didn’t get near the use their original costs warranted, and I resolve to be more discerning before laying out big money: Will I truly use this item, or is it just going to end up as next summer’s yard sale fodder?

I thought a lot about this resolve this morning, as we went to and from church. And guess what?

On the way home, we stopped at someone else’s yard sale, and I found a few fun things to bring home….

Treasures and Findings

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about my good fortune when my friend Sue passed along to me a bag of "loot" from a yard sale. 

{A photo to jog your memory!}

Well, she wasn't done with her surprises!  She also picked up a photo album/scrapbook full of photos and postcards from Europe in the 1950s.  When she finished looking through it, she decided to pass it along to me, as well!

{I love the look of a scrapbook bursting with postcards and ephemera!}

A plastic bag at the front of the book held Western Union telegrams from 1950 wishing the family Bon Voyage as they headed to Europe on the Queen Mary.  There was a passenger list from their journey, menu cards, hotel pamphlets, a postcard from Holland, and a letter still in the envelope with stamps worth 7 cents--enough to send a letter from Connecticut to Paris in 1952!

The funniest thing in the bag was an article clipping with the headline:  "'Fondue' is the National Dish; Doesn't Go With Cold Drinks."  The article explains that drinking cold drinks while eating fondue can "turn cheese to a hard lump in the stomach with dire consequences." 

The book itself is filled with photos and postcards from this family's travel in Europe during 1951-1952.  It seems as though they moved to Paris for work, and then used that city as their home base to travel all over the continent.  There are photos from Paris, Brussels, Pompeii, Capri, Rome, Monaco, Amsterdam, Bonn, Strasbourg, Lucerne, London, and Edinburgh, to name only the "biggest" names.

The family appears to have two teenage girls.  A brochure included in the scrapbook tells me that high school tuition for the American Community School in Paris costs $100 a term! 

I can tell they have a certain sense of humor:  in addition to a family photo aboard the Queen Mary, there is a photo of a stuffed panda bear on a deck chair:

The scrapbook gives me such a window into the lives of these complete strangers from another time.  In addition to plenty of impersonal postcards of European cathedrals, there are photos that feel so immediate and personal:

There are some great 1950s-era graphics on the brochures that have been stashed away among the pages:

There is even a sprig of dried flowers among the spread from their travels in Edinburgh, Scotland:

(Edinburgh, and especially Edinburgh Castle, is especially close to my heart, because that's where my husband proposed to me in 2004!)

I have NO idea what I am going to do with this album.  Somehow it's easier to cut, paste, paint, and collage on an individual photo or piece of ephemera I might encounter at a yard sale.  But I pause to do these things to a personal collection of such scale! 

I am curious:  if such a collection were in YOUR hands, what would you do with it?  I really would like to know.