I’m an ephemera junkie. Whether at a boot fair or walking down the street, a pretty design on a 60s tights packet, a bus ticket or a torn sweetie wrapper will jump out at me. I have to be led away from skips, or left for hours in junk shops while I rifle though bits of paper. I can’t help it. Beautiful printed colours, designs and illustrations resonate deeply with me.

‘Scrapbooking’ is often considered a pastime of older ladies with time on their hands, but I also love to paste the things I find into sugar paper books as inspiration for my work. If I don’t do this they get lost or tucked away in drawers. Scrapbooks can take on a life of their own, with themed pages forming and colours combining. It’s a bit like working in a sketchbook, you can’t be too precious about it and a lot of things don’t work, but when it does it’s lovely. Buying scraps ready to paste in holds no interest for me as these books are more like visual diaries, and the ephemera helps me to recall things that were influencing me and places I went to.

These days I read newspapers online, and don’t have as many paper magazines and supplements knocking around. Pinterest has filled the gap though, and I love losing hours browsing things other people have pinned. Xtina Lamb on Pinterest.

Here’s a peep at some favourite pages from my scrapbooks. I’d love to see yours too. When I first met artist Tracey Bush we were amazed at how similar some of our scrapbook pages were, as we’d collected some of the exact same things.