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Scrapbooking with Items in an Antique Store
by Cheryl Miller
Martha Stewart recently announced her new scrapbook line that will be
available in Michaels. I’ve seen it – it’s great. However, I’ve seen even more
wonderful scrapbooking items and they are right in your favorite antique store,
and more than likely, right in your own home.
I have found nearly 40 different sources for wonderful scrapbooking items
including: almanacs, blotters, bookmarks, bookplates, bridge tallies, business
cards, buttons, calendars, calling cards, carte-de-visites, catalogs,
certificates, charms, cigar labels, coins, cookbooks, crate labels,
dictionaries, envelopes/stationary, games/game pieces, greeting cards, hymnals,
jigsaw puzzles, letterhead, magazines, menus, paper dolls, perfume labels,
photos, playbills, postcards, posters, rewards of merit, scrap, sewing notions,
sheet music, silhouettes, songbooks, stamps, and trade cards.
These scrapbook items were used by all types of people – even presidents.
While in office from 1801 to 1809, Thomas Jefferson filled his books with
clippings of poems and articles related to his presidency. It is hard to imagine
the author of the Declaration of Independence with scissors and paste, gluing
poems about owls and parrots on the back of his own correspondence and adding
bits and pieces of scrap.
The hobby of preserving illustrations, clippings, and memorabilia in a book
gained a name in 1820 in a magazine called The Scrapbook. By the mid-19th
century, middle-class families spent leisure time placing “scrap” items in blank
paper books now known as scrapbooks. Once ordinary advertising pieces and other
assortments of scrap are now wonderful items found in antique stores.
So doesn’t it make sense that we look at items from the past to use in our
scrapbooks? I think scrapbooks should be more than pictures, squiggly lines, and
die cuts. We put so much of our time and ourselves into our scrapbooks and I
feel each one should be special. Incorporating a vintage page from an almanac or
a unique postcard and coupling it with your photo and a quote makes for a very
special one-of-a-kind page that is simply a treasure.
Antique stores contain a treasure trove of scrapbooking items. In addition,
begin looking through your family treasures and you are sure to find vintage
items unique to your family including old postcards, family newspaper clippings,
and other assorted ephemera. Martha Stewart’s new line may be cute, but you’ll
soon be creating wonderful pages with vintage items that are sure to make your
scrapbooks very special.
Almanacs
For centuries, almanacs of al types played an important role in the daily
lives of rural and suburban Americans. During the 17th to the 19th centuries,
farmers, settlers, and peddlers carried the almanac with them as the frontier
moved west.
The most well known almanac is The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which has been
published annually since 1793. The same cover illustration, which features
portraits of its founders and first editors – Robert B. Thomas and Benjamin
Franklin, has been used for centuries and there are no plans to change it. Sales
each year top one million.
The almanac contains a calendar with weather forecasts, a wide variety of
useful astronomical information, lists of holidays, phases of the planets and a
table of times. Before 1900, they served as a source for medical advise,
household hints, farming/planting data, and even advice for child rearing.
During the 19th century there was a never-ending flow of almanacs, the vast
majority of them advertising booklets. These were extensively used by patent
medicine manufacturers and sellers and were usually give-aways. Businesses of
every type found them an excellent means of promoting their products or services
because they were kept around the home for an entire year.
NOTES: Almanac pages are good for birthday cards because they have
astrological pages. They also have phases of the moon and fishing guides – good
for scrapbooks. Almanacs tend to be pretty brittle because they were published
on inferior paper and it does crumble. At first glance, you might think there
are no images worth scanning in the Almanac. Look closer as there are an
abundance of images. However, you will probably have to lighten the images after
you scan because the booklets are typically quite discolored.
 Page from an almanac
 Recipe using almanac page and metallic
cardstock.
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