Convert Paper Ephemera to Digital

If you’re into junk journals, scrapbooking, planners, and other papercrafting I bet you have some ephemera in your stash that you consider your favorites.  Chances are, you are really careful about using it in your projects. In fact, if you’re like me, you might not be using it at all because it’s so special you’re waiting for the ‘perfect’ project to use it in. What if I told you that you could use your favorites over and over and never run out? A dream? Magic? Nope, just convert paper ephemera to digital files that you can print over and over again.

In fact, if you have a scanner, computer and printer, you can have an endless supply of your favorite ephemera pieces.

Total disclosure here, not every piece of ephemera is going to transfer easily to digital.  And some pieces might require a bit of image editing expertise. But the simpler pieces, like old magazine pages, vintage pictures and book pages can be as easy as scanning and saving as a pdf.

I don’t need to tell you how to do that. It’s simple.  But what about slightly more complex things, like library pockets?

In this case, you’ll may have to make a sacrifice of the item, but it’s worth it for an endless supply right?

For example, my daughter is a librarian and brought me home a small bundle of library pockets in several different styles.  I found myself hoarding them, that’s when I knew it was time to go from paper ephemera to digital.

I chose my favorite and carefully took it apart at the seams, being super careful to keep it all in one piece. Once it was undone, I flattened it and put it on my flatbed scanner. I ended up with the image below.

A little digital touch-up

I could have used it just like this, but I wanted to be able to resize it among other things.  I opened the scan in my image editing software (I use Photoshop, but Express, Paint.net or even PicMonkey works).  I use my wand tool to select the white background, and then save the image as a .PNG file, which saves it with the transparent background.

That’s it. Now I can open it and print it from Photoshop or pull it into Word to print it out.  Over and over again.  Because digital graphics is my thing, I’ve even used it to create new digital ephemera with vintage collage designs in my new Witches & Wizards, ETC. Add-on Kit that I’ll be adding to my Etsy Shop September 3, 2018.  You can see it in the video below.

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