Here’s why I’m glad I didn’t… .

I was at Savers with my daughter, just browsing the book section the way I always do.

You never know what materials you'll find.

I just happened to pick up a small, weathered old book. It was $1.99. When I opened it, the first thing I saw was handwriting. Not a printed page. Actual handwriting…from 1860.

I stood there for a minute just marveling at it.

What was I actually holding?

It was a friendship album. In the 1800s, young women kept books like this and passed them around. Friends, family, neighbors, teachers. Each person filled a page with a poem, a little sentiment, their name, the date, and where they were from.

A living record of someone's whole world.

And, that someone? Her name was Maranda Stewart. She was seventeen when she started the friendship album. The entries go all the way through 1885. Twenty-five years of her life, recorded in other people's hands, many of whom called her “Ran,” short for Maranda.

If you want to see the album for yourself, this is where the story begins.

There was a death announcement tucked between the pages, dated 1914. That is how I traced her to Waterford, Virginia, a town that sheltered freedom seekers during the Civil War. Most of the buildings from the 1800s are still standing there today.

I knew this album was not mine to keep. And it was definitely not mine to cut apart.

Some things are too important for the collage table. I say that as someone who loves working with vintage paper and ephemera. This one was different.

Here is what I discovered when I started digging into who she really was.

What made it even more interesting?

Maranda's album has a signature page. Names arranged in a careful pattern. Her friends, her family, her community, all in their own handwriting, from their own towns.

I thought about that for a long time.

And then I invited our community to do the same thing.

People from all over the world have been writing their name and their town on a small card and mailing it in. Every card gets scanned and woven into a formal addendum, arranged in the spirit of her original signature pages. The album will travel with that addendum when it goes home to Waterford, Virginia this October.

A 164-year-old practice, picked back up. By paper people, with a pen and a stamp.

That felt right to me.

You can download your own free prints from Maranda's album here.

And, this July, we’re bringing more of Maranda’s album pages to life.

Inside the Vintage and Collage Club, we are taking Maranda's pages to the collage table.

We are doing a tea-dye project using prints from her actual journal. The finished piece is an accordion mini book (a concertina) with that warm, aged look that vintage paper naturally has. Tea-dyed paper is one of my favorite things to work with. The character it adds is hard to get any other way.

Using Maranda's pages as our source material felt like the right way to continue what she started.

We have three meetups planned throughout July. Plenty of time to work at your own pace and ask questions as you go.

*The Maranda Project July Tea-Dye Project Inside Vintage & Collage Club*

If this sounds like something you want to be part of, I would love to have you inside the Vintage and Collage Club for July.

I Almost Used This 1860 Friendship Album for Collage

Collage on a canvas