A special vintage yearbook

We’re working on creating collages in a small tin in the Vintage & Collage Club this month, and you’re welcome to join us! Not only are we making collage tins this month, we’re going to be exchanging envelopes of vintage ephemera. You can sign up a total of 4 times to exchange envelopes with 4 different people.

Come sit with us and work on some collage art inspired from vintage papers!

Here’s how I created this accordion-fold collage in a tin.

By chance, an artist friend of mine (thank you, Melissa!!) sent me some pages from an old 1950s yearbook. My goodness those faces!

The pages were from Berkeley High School, from a city in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What was interesting to me was the diversity of the students—so many races represented! Wasn’t that unusual?

Looking up the story of high school in the Berkeley area, I learned that they implemented a desegregation program in the late 50s and 60s where children were bussed from different neighborhoods to schools so that there was a mix of students. Kamala Harris touched on this topic briefly while campaigning. She mentioned that she was one of those kids bussed to a different area, and what a profoundly positive impact it had on her life.

I loved seeing this diversity in a school so long ago and wanted to create a collage project celebrating this.

I decided to take a small tin, something the size of a peppermint tin, and create a series of collages with some of these students.

I chose vintage papers that had images or texts that represented the time, 50s and 60s, or possible subjects that highschoolers could have been studying at the time, such as music, typing, electronics, etc.

I created an accordion of pages so that they could fit in the tin. Since I had so many faces, I decided to do girls on one side and boys on the other.

For the outside of the tin, I decided not to decorate it. I liked the image of the TV just as it was, and think it adds to the mid-century vibe.

If you are looking for tins, you can find some nice ones at the grocery store. Here are some examples from Trader Joe’s. These ones I would probably collage on top of. If I do that, I’d sand the top a bit with sandpaper so that the glue would stick better to the tin.

Here’s another type of tin I placed some small collages in. This tin held soap originally.

What could you put in a tin? Some kind of paper treasure? I’m sure you could come up with something. I hope you’ll give it a try.