Summer is a-coming in, and the school holidays are nearly upon us. Whether you spend them at home or away, how better to record your summer holiday adventures than by keeping your memories in a journal?
We have some great journals and scrapbooks in the archive collections, and they provided lots of inspiration for our Family Fun day on Saturday. The participants made their very own journals to take away and learned real bookbinding skills, sewing the pages to the binding using waxed thread. They also designed and made book plates to stick in the inside covers of their journals.
Check out the photos of the event below:
Participants of all ages used real bookbinding skills to make their journals.
The finished product – an elegant journal with a coloured, beaded tie.
The participants designed, inked and stamped their own book plates.
Inking up the book plates took quite a lot of effort!
And here are some pictures of some of the scrapbooks and journals in our collection:
The image above is from the notebook of David Cardno. Born in Peterhead in 1853, he worked on whaling ships when he was only a young boy. He travelled to many areas of the Arctic and he became very interested in the Innuit customs and way of life. The page above shows a sketch of an igloo. This notebook is full of written descriptions interspersed with drawings. He also recorded Innuit words and translated them into English.
Below are some pages from the Countess of Kintore’s scrapbook. She loved to record the lives and careers of her children and husband, and her scrapbook is a great example of how you can use mixed media to record events in a journal. She pasted in envelopes with letters and locks of hair, postcards, newspaper cuttings, leaves and flowers and even an embroidered picture by one of her children. The family moved to South Australia in the late 1800s when the Earl of Kintore became Governor-General, so the scrapbook also has elements of a travel journal.
Why don’t you come along to our next Family Fun event? We will be holding free events for children and families every Wednesday afternoon from 1-4pm during the holidays.
Look out for our ‘how to’ on making a journal, coming soon.
Posted by: Sarah and Lynsey
UoA Collections 
Would’ve loved to have been there! Of course, I’m no longer a kid, but creating your own journal or bookbinding one sounds really interesting. Plus I love the journals/scrapbooks you featured in this post.
Just because you’re not a kid anymore doesn’t mean you can’t have fun making your own journal – we did! Look out for our ‘how to’ post which will show you how we made ours. Plus if you like you can send us pictures of it and we’ll post them up on the blog – we’d love to see how people get on with using our how-to’s.
I’ll check them out and try to make one this month. 🙂 Thanks for the tip!
[…] in June we ran a Family Fun session where the participants made travel journals for recording their summer holiday adventures, and in the process they learnt some elementary […]