Art Day—Shadow Box Edition

As I mentioned, it's craft day here. It's been craft day for a few days in a row, actually, and all that craftiness has yielded three shadow boxes displaying pages from old text books. Among the old books on my shelves, I realized I had a nice collection of family books—my mother's fourth-grade math book and her science book from some year after that, and my grandmother's fifth-grade English book. My grandmother was married in 1920, so backtrack from there; and my mother was in the fourth grade in 1935.

I started by laying out the raw materials—shadow boxes from JoAnns craft store, some tiny paperclips and glue dots from the same store and the loose pages cut from the books:

Beginning with the math book, I came up with a way to present the pages, folded loosely and glued at the end, and I laid them out on the board from the frame. It took several tries and lots of reorganizing, but I finally got what I wanted. I added some fun things—I chose some photos from the book, scanned them in and printed them on vintage looking paper and then clipped them to add interest. I also printed photos of my mother and grandmother to make these things more personal.

And voila—art.

Here is the math box with a photo of my mother and her older brother, Clifton. It was winter, and a freak snow blanketed the ground of their farm in Alabama, so the two put on their swimsuits and had someone take a photo of them. Why? Who knows.

Here is the science box with a photo of my mother and her younger sister, Sybel. This one also features a scrap from one of the book pages on which my mother wrote, "If you get married and you have twins, don't come to me for safety pins." That was just too choice to leave out.

And here is my grandmother's English box. In the top righthand corner, I featured a photo from the book of children looking wide-eyed through a toy store window, and the caption reads "The Promised Land." Sweet, right?