Playing with Paper and Ink

I rarely buy antiques anymore, but I love poking around in thrift and junk shops, especially the bins of paper and photographs, letters, maps, and postcards.  I've always preferred these sections, but until now, I would just put them in a box.  Now I am incorporating them into visual journals.

The old photographs find their ways onto both journals and old green Elk Club Bingo cards--I have a stash of these I recently found at Ironside Antiques.

In Georgia, I found a package of Blue Horse loose leaf filler paper.  From third grade on, this was the paper we used for our handwritten school work.  I used a refillable Schaffer fountain pen when pens were allowed and I almost always had ink-stained fingers.  When I finished my boring pencil math problems, I would use them as a cover sheet and write stories or draw maps of imaginary towns on the pages underneath.

Last night, after a full weekend with the kids, I put the Blue Horse blue wrapper in a journal.  You know the ones?  They advertised free prizes for kids, big prizes like bicycles.  I never sent in my wrappers toward a prize, but it was always exciting to imagine winning one.

Handwritten notes from friends and family are always keepers.  Years ago, before email, Linda Kot and I wrote long letters to each other from Cape Cod to Helotes.  We both resisted email as long as we could.  Linda said, "If we start using email, we won't write letters anymore."  She was right.  But this morning, I was happy to get a text from her saying:

"Just want to thank you for recommending Words in Pain.  I'm savoring every sentence and reading every paragraph slowly and rereading paragraphs to Steve....Letters truly are gifts to the world and windows to soul searching!  The art of the heart!  Thanks again, this is a treasure trove of true spirituality."

Handwriting on Blue Horse paper was the beginning of knowing what Linda expressed so well--that words committed to paper could become an art of the heart.

This is one reason it was such a thrill to me to see Nathan and Elena so engrossed in learning to write Japanese characters on graph paper and in a workbook for Japanese children.  Elena particularly loved it and worked on hers for hours.

If you want to give your grandchildren (or yourself) a gift that connects head and hands, these are the two books that sparked their imagination: