Tell a Story with Vintage Ephemera | Caroline Preston’s Scrapbook Novel

by | Embellishments, Ideas via Product & Technique

Scrapbook and art journal pages allow us to tell stories – of ourselves, the people in our lives, and sometimes even of characters we imagine.

The imagined stories fiction writer Caroline Preston has told in her novels have been heavily inspired by her love of the vintage scrapbooks in her own family and the manuscripts and ephemera she studied and preserved in her work as an archivist at at the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Peabody/Essex Museum and Harvard’s Houghton Library.

Caroline’s novel Jackie by Josie was drawn from her (brief) researching stint for a Jackie O. biography. Gatsby’s Girlchronicles F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first girlfriend who was the model for Daisy Buchanan. In The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt Caroline has drawn from her own collection of vintage ephemera to create a novel in the unique form of a scrapbook: a scrapbook novel.

In the webinar recording below, Caroline shares vintage scrapbook pages, a look at many pages from her new novel, and pictures of ephemera she collected for the book. She also answers a whole bunch of questions from our audience about the book’s making as well as tracking down and purchasing ephemera.

Caroline has agreed to come back soon for another webinar in which she’ll share more of the vintage scrapbooks she’s collected and talk about what we can learn from them that’s relevant for our own scrapbooks. Click here to get on our mailing list and receive notice of the event.

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Check out Caroline Preston’s website for interviews, links, a blog with peeks at her favorite ephemera finds, and even a video trailer for the book by clicking here: scrapbook novel.

Want to make sure you’re collecting today’s ephemera and recording current times in your own pages? The October issue of Masterful Scrapbook Design covers this topic with ideas from paper and digital scrapbookers Kelly Purkey, Doris Sander, Paula Gilarde, Lynnette Penacho, and Keandra Willis. Seminar and article pdfs and 6 webinars in video, audio, and transcript formats. Cost $16. Click here and get “the times” in your own albums.