I had never purchased a coordinating ephemera pack but one of my favorite cardmakers uses them occasionally so I thought I’d give it a try.  Since I wasn’t sure if I’d like using the ephemera I decided to see what was available at my local Tuesday Morning store (prices of papercrafting products are usually up to 50% off retail).  There were several paper pads but only 1 had the coordinating ephemera – World Traveler by My Mind’s Eye.  I liked the colors and the prints in the paper pad and figured I could use just the paper if I didn’t like using the ephemera.

I’m sure the paper would work for birthday, miss you, etc. but I decided to skip any sentiments and only use what was included in the ephemera pack.  And with 60 ephemera pieces there was a lot to use up.

The hot air balloon was my favorite ephemera piece so I used it first.  The background uses the hot air balloon paper for the bottom portion and a bright green cardstock for the top portion.  A blue Love from Lizi peel-off was added to the seam between the 2 papers.  The balloon and “So Fun!” ephemera pieces were popped up with foam tape on the the pink/white stripe panel.  The top portion of the card looked a little plain so I wrapped the panel with blue and white bakers twine and tied a small bow.  As a finishing touch a few clear crystal drops were added around the ephemera.

The camera print paper was cute but with the white background it seemed to wash out the brightly colored papers.  Instead of trying to brighten up the camera print I decided to go with the pale color scheme, pairing it with a pale pink/white print and using a pale pink cardstock for the background.  The navy cardstock used for all the mattings highlighted the different panels.  Keeping with the pink theme, a couple pink brads and pink glitter Love from Lizi peel-offs were added as embellishment.

Another fun ephemera piece was the pink camera.  To ensure it didn’t get lost in the busyness of the two paper panels, I matted it on a blue cardstock circle.

With all of the different colors, the map ephemera should have been easy to use but…  Instead of layering it on the bright prints, it seemed to work best when layered on one of the pale pink/white prints with the bright print used as the background.

The ephemera pack included a couple of larger sized tags which I used as focal panels.  A bit of bakers twine was added to the tops of the tags and then the entire piece was matted with coordinating cardstock.  Since they were airport baggage claim tags, I paired them with the airplane print paper.

For the road sign ephemera, like the Route 66 and Detour pieces, I paired them up with the map and other road travel related paper.

I’m not sure if this was the best ephemera pack to use as a first try.  While all of the pieces were travel related, they could only realistically be paired with specific papers.  For example, the road sign ephemera wouldn’t have worked with the airplane print paper and the airplane ephemera wouldn’t have worked with the bicycle print paper.  I did manage to use up over half of the pieces but other than a couple small tags I’m not sure what I’ll do with the remaining ephemera.  I’m not giving up on using ephemera packs, but based on the experience with this collection, next time I will look for paper and ephemera with a narrower focus (i.e. only one type of travel).