Greetings, Art Lovers!

Today is the release day of “Downton Abbey – The Grand Finale”! For 15 years, from the Masterpiece series on PBS to subsequent movies, the characters living upstairs and downstairs in the grand house have brought us to laughter and tears. My daughter and I will definitely take in this final movie, and I might or might not wear a fascinator hat.

I celebrated by making a couple of small handmade journals featuring 1920s ephemera. I love the sassy/classy attitudes in these black-and-white fashion illustrations from the 1920s. These books feature 50 blank pages for thoughts or sketches. But I’ve also dropped in a tiny calendar page from 1929, and added little cherub children clipped from a 1922 postcard and tucked into a vintage pocket on the inside back cover. A 1920s grocery receipt graces one, and a 1920s film star visage from an ad graces the other.

I do love a lot of the 1920s aesthetics, and I just love finding anything 100 years old and wondering about its past lives. Recently I came across this tiny celluloid blank date book from 1928. These were evidently made into address books and memo books, too – just the size to pop into a steel bead-laden purse, perhaps? I was thrilled to see that it is held together by two celluloid jump rings. I’ve used metal jump rings for years to make tiny journals, but I didn’t know how far back that idea went. Too fun!