Ephemera...

I love ephemera! All those weird little things that one finds on the street or just in the course of everyday living... Stamps, playing cards, business cards, photos, tea envelopes, chocolate wrappers, theater tickets, flyers... The list is endless!

Over the years it's all found its way into my journals and has caused the 'V' effect I mention in Saturday's posting about Transformer... The way I get around this in my hand bound journals is to bind in a waste signature of a single folded sheet of cover stock every other signature. I use cover stock cut to the same sheet size as my regular pages, but when I come to them, I cut them out. They hold space at the spine of the book for all the stuff I paste in. Here's one from Crazily Paisley:

You can see the ephemera: a card, a tea envelope, and, tucked into it, a chocolate wrapper from a Bliss chocolate. Here's a side view:

This is just cheap card stock. The one here is an off-white because that's what I had on hand when I bound the book. Since the paper I use, Schiller, is a white-white, I usually try to use white cover stock, but sometimes I'm in a hurry to bind a journal and the paper store isn't open.

Another thing to notice is what's holding the playing card into the book: it's an address label. I carry a bunch of these in the back pocket/envelope in my book, so I can stick stuff into the book right away and not have it fall out. If I think I want to attach it in some other way, I'll put it in the pocket/envelope until I get home and have time to deal with it. Here's a picture of the pocket from Four of a Kind:

When I print the endsheets, like I did for this journal, it's easy to make the pocket match the papers... You just print another and cut the pocket/envelope out of that.

These latest bindings all have either eight or nine signatures of paper pages - four sheets to a signature... Which, when folded and thought of front and back, mean sixteen pages to a signature. Right now a journal this size is lasting me a bit over two months. My old, larger journals usually lasted for six months or more! Looks like I'm going to need to build more shelves to house all these guys!