About a year ago, I was trying—again—to reestablish a regular memorykeeping practice. It just wasn’t working. I’d recently quit my job and was still in the thick of autistic burnout and passive suicidality. I didn’t have the brain space for a regular memorykeeping practice, and anyway I wasn’t doing anything aside from lying on my couch all day so there wasn’t anything to document. I wanted to do something, though. Something that took less effort and was basically impossible to fuck up. So I dug this acrylic album out of my stash and a stack of old ID (and similar) cards out of a container in my closet and made this very simple project.
To secure the cards, I trimmed off the top part of Photo Flips and, using the album cover as a guide, punched holes in the top center of each photo flip. It’s all clipped together with a binder ring.
The whole project took maybe an hour. The most challenging and time-consuming parts were deciding which cards to include (all old school and work IDs and drivers licenses, select business cards, old membership cards, and other IDs and various cards that hold the most sentimental value) and in what order (mostly chronological).
Many of the cards in this album are old school and work IDs and drivers licenses. Aside from the one school ID shown below, none of them are included in this post. I didn’t feel like doing the work required to block out all my personal information.
In addition to old school and work IDs and drivers licenses, I also included things like bank cards, health insurance cards, library cards (mine and my kids’), membership cards, neighborhood pool passes (RIP to living on the east coast where every neighborhood has an outdoor pool), National Parks annual passes, business cards (my own and others’), SmarTrip cards, the train schedule I kept in my work bag for the days I commuted by train, and key tags for some of the gyms I’ve belonged to.
Like my pandemic puzzles mini album, because this project is clipped together with a binder ring, it’s expandable so I can keep adding to it over time, which I love.
