Vintage Scrapbook Restoration

I've put this off long enough.

One of my ongoing projects is the restoration of my Dad's 60-year-old scrapbook from his FFA project which chronicles his high school experiences. This is an incredible collection of photos, articles, newsletters to which Dad contributed, scads and wads of ribbons of all colors, and even his first official sermon he ever preached! It's called "Roll Out The Barrel!"I haven't worked on this for over a year. It was a tough year last year, while I was sidelined after hand surgery.

The restoration of this work has presented a couple of challenges. One is how to remount the pages of ribbons in such a way that the pages won't collapse around them. I'm going to build in some stubs and mats to those pages. The other problem is the need to add more to the cover boards where the posts reside. The old ones had completely come loose from the whole book. I want to keep the original cover, because it is so unique, so had to come up with a way to connect more board area to the side. The cover is one of my favorite elements of the scrapbook, and was even when I was a child, and so I went to the trouble of restoring it to close to its original beauty, filling in chips and holes, stablizing the corners with Japanese tissue, and color matching it.I'm getting back to this project very soon, as I finish up orders for hand-cut and hand-bound journals I committed to making at the end of last month.