Preserving Memories: The Shadowbox

I started my part-time job this week.  It's a nonprofit where I used to work a little bit in high school and sometimes during the summers between college years.  And I love it.  It's one of those jobs where you know what to expect each day; a bunch of different tasks here and there in order to assist the full-time employees.  Most of my work this week revolved around data collection & entry, organizing & sending out mailers, and sending press releases about upcoming events to different news sources.  What's weird, though, is that almost none of the employees I used to work with are there anymore; they've all got different jobs or moved.  Yet another reminder that people are fluid and change with time.  Maybe this will remind me to think differently about the move up to DC in a couple of months.

The perk to working part-time, though, is that there is optimal free time, during which I have been quite productive.  One of my favorite tasks that I have assigned myself for the summer is to find unique ways to preserve my college memories & the objects that came with it.  The first one (which I just finished) is a shadowbox.

A shadowbox is kind of like a unique picture frame.  This one had adjustable panels so you could make it as shallow or deep as you wanted.  Going off the example a friend of mine had made, I took a piece of flexible corkboard and put it in the back of the frame.  Then, I took pieces of my college experience and "pinned" them to the corkboard before putting it in the frame with glass.  I absolutely love it.  You can put almost anything you want in a shadowbox; mine includes my acceptance letter to UM (circa 2012), our apartment holiday card (2015), the alma mater lyrics from my admission packet (2012), a picture of Sebastian the Ibis along with our athletics motto "it's great to be a Miami Hurricane", a photostrip from the UM vs FSU game in Tallahassee this fall, my bid card (2013) and a photostrip from semiformal last December.  The little blue notes are two messages people wrote me semi-anonymously from our sorority's sisterhood retreat this spring, and I topped it all off by putting in my Class of 2016 tassel.

I'm thinking of making another shadowbox with the leftover cork, some thin rope and clothespins to show off some of my favorite pictures from the past 4 years.  Who knows?  But for now, I love what I have created and cannot wait to have a piece of UM in DC with me next year!