Sunflower Ephemera Holder

 

The cover sports a sunflower but that’s about it for sunflowers. 

I started making ephemera holders to send off to Nevermore Creations 17 Marketplace. I thought this would be a simple project but this has taken me forever to finish just the one. I have several journals in the works and kept pulling the handmade ephemera to use in the journals.

It includes altered guest checks that have been bubble printed and embellished with woven paper strips and some kind of focal image. I was watching a video at 49 Dragonflies awhile back and she had mixed a bowl of ink with water and dishwashing soap then blew bubbles through a straw to then dip paper onto thus leaving a bubbly imprint onto the paper. I tried this by taking several spent ink cartridges from my HP  printer and leaving them to soak in a large jar of water. I’m on the instant ink program but they never send me enough return envelopes for recycling so I had built up quite a backstock of cartridges. Turns out they release a nice purple inky water after several days.

There are a lot of hand made tags, collaged journaling cards, and belly bands within. I haven’t actually counted the pieces but there’s got to be about 60 pieces if I count each sticker.

I included a lot of embellishments I have collected over the years…many assorted stickers and images that I love to use in my own journal pages as well as what I use to decorate the journals I send to Nevermore Creations 17.

My covers usually involve a lot of mixed media layering that starts as a collaged sheet of scrap card stock or food packaging ie. frozen pizza boxes, cracker boxes, and cereal boxes. Then layered with tinted gel medium or gesso, then stenciled texture paste, then a mix of acrylic paint and distress sprays, then finally another layer of gel medium and acrylic spray. The spines are reinforced with painted Tyvek on the outside and fabric on the inside and then machine stitched around. From start to finish these covers take about 3 hours to create.

My idea was that whoever buys this could, theoretically, deconstruct, and turn this into a journal by snipping the 3 hole binding stitching, adding their own papers, then re-assembling to include the pocket pages and use the ephemera and embellishments to decorate their journal or use the stuff somewhere else.