Collage Ephemera Packs

This is a small package of little tags, faux stamps and the like that I made and will be putting on Etsy. I also just shipped ten large packages of ephemera to Scraplovers@A Work of Heart in San Jose (my candy store!). Like a goof, I forgot to take photos before I shipped them off. But they were chock full of vintage papers, maps, ledgers, foreign dictionary pages, sheet music, old algebra and shorthand pages, scraps of ribbon, ric-rac, dominoes and other game pieces. I like to put together things that I used to always be on the look out for. Out of frustration,I started collecting all that and the next thing I knew, my studio was bulging at the seams. So I save some of it for myself and the rest goes to California.
When I first started collecting old maps and things, I hated to tear them up, but then I thought, "What am I going to do? Hang onto these forever?" And I knew I could never make enough collages the rest of my life to use everything, so I just ripped and tore, and, you know...it's kind of fun.
This morning I was up bright and early for yard sales, and as per usual, the first one I hit was a disappointment. But the next one was more like it. The guy who was selling had two old sheds full of old rusted and grimy stuff...usually the kind of thing I like to jump right into the middle of. But apparently the roof had leaked in one building because all the boxes were falling apart and were black from mildew. But I scored a cigar box full of old receipts, ancient Christmas cards and letters that weren't in too bad shape. And what do you know? There is an old 1904 map of North Dakota in all this. I didn't even realize it was from North Dakota until I got it home and the piece that was facing up had Williams County on it. Seems like some kind of weird karma as I have just this week been contacted on Facebook by several old classmates from my high school in North Dakota. Whenever something like this happens, I always like to think that it's a "sign" or something. But it's probably just a coincidence.
And yes, I'm aware that I ended a couple of sentences with prepositions.