trimmingthesails

Scrapbooking as taught by a monk ...

... one blistering hot day, many moons ago, far, far away. As I passed through the shaded cloisters, the cool and faintly musty air rose up the stone steps to meet me. Down there, he waited patiently - though I had no idea of his existence at the time. Kneeling on my chair to open with both hands the huge and heavy wooden covers of the little-known collection of twelfth-century sermons, I caught the weary archivist's eye. I could tell he was thinking: "She'd better not send this one back after ten minutes and ask for another like she did this morning - my back is killing me."

But I didn't this time. For although it didn't contain what I was looking for, I found something else. Someone else. There was just a faint trace at first, like a whisper - an additional flourish here in the margin, a few hatched lines there. As the thick crackling parchment pages turned, he gradually revealed himself in the light brown ink: first an arched window, next a little mouse with a very long tail that dropped off the edge of the page, then a tonsured monk with a bulbous nose: himself? the Prior? There were a few faint words in Latin about bad meat, a scrap of parchment lying between two pages with what looked like a list of herbs - from the garden? the apothecary? I was enchanted. I imagined him in his rough, brown hopsack habit, standing or perched on a high stool, copying out these endlessly long Augustinian sermons; and how, for a little light relief every so often, he would doodle... Did he get into trouble, I wondered?

And then the hairs on my arms began to rise and I could feel the goose-bumps beneath them: he'd touched the same pages I was now touching. Somewhere on them still was his DNA - he and I were shaking hands down the centuries. And he'd left something of his personhood for others - me - to meet ...

Although it was another quarter of a century untl I discovered scrapbooking, I was reminded of him today. As I finish the Week in My Life project, I've been pondering whether, another year, it might take the shape of a professionally produced photo book: perfectly straight lines, clean and beautifully printed pages. Yet, apart from never having lost my love of pockets and pull-outs and interactive paper delights, what tugs at me is the sense of being in contact with a real person that a hand-made scrapbook provides. Knowing that someone, someone like me, has written that date, punched those holes, smoothed that piece of paper after glueing, has left something of themselves in it ... I'm not sure I'll be able to give that up.

What about you? I'd love to hear ... The on-line album (see right) contains the digital pages which I've printed out and are now in my spiral-bound This is 2011 album. I daresay there's a photo a little wonky, or a smear of glue somewhere I couldn't quite remove - but, remembering with a smile my old monastic friend, I don't think I care. :)

Spiralling into control ...

Having wrestled with the whole post-bound or D-ring album debate and a dollop of my-goodness-they-weigh-a-ton disquiet, you might remember that I decided back in January to experiment with putting everything into a single home-made spiral bound album this year. To my chagrin, my This is 2011 album has been piling up in loose sheets, and seven months on it is clearly Time To Get A Grip. You might think that an argument against a spiral-bound album is that you can't insert pages later? Well ...

• a recent post by Mary Anne reminded me that, years ago, I bought a file in which the holes of the transparent pockets have a little slit so they can be easily moved on and off the spiral binding. I found it and had a good look.
• after making a row of holes with the Bind-it-All in a piece of card, I snipped from the edge to the centre of each hole.
• with a finger gently pushed the card into place around the spirals: you might think it would fall out or pop out on turning the page, but it is quite secure.

So this weekend, I will be putting it all together: current completed pages, blank pages for the future, and resting content in the knowledge that if I want to insert a page somewhere, it will be possible. Here's how the first spread of a Week In My Life is shaping up:

• journalling cards with dotted lines (never mastered writing in a straight line)
• strips of double-sided tape, using a journalling card as a guide, to make a pocket on the back of the printed photo-sheet
• photo-sheet stuck onto album page, card slipped into the pocket behind the photo, easy to pull out, with hidden journalling
• double page spread in the queue for the spiral-binder

Only another six to go! Have you finished yours yet? Please feel free to leave a link so we can come and visit. :)

Thank-you to a recent visitor, Justasiam, whose interest and nice comments reminded me that access to the archives was not clear. After some steep learning curves and wrestling with html code and CSS style-sheets (refusing to accept Typepad's assertion that the words Archives and Categories could not be styled in a colour to match the other headings), I am pleased to report, a little puffy-eyed. that they now display in the column on the right.

Time to stop going round in circles and get spiralling somewhere instead! Hope your weekend is lovely. :)

Bunny girls ...

... are not really my thing", observed Himself - though I think I'd have fallen off my tussock of grass if he'd divulged the opposite. "But I don't suppose you could take a photo of me with this one, could you?" I didn't quite like the way he seemed to enjoy snuggling in and hanging onto her leg but she was - in all truth - more of a hare than a bunny. And I didn't really want to spoil his fun... If you can spot him, you'll have an idea of how huge these sculptures were in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park we visited on Saturday, and how extraordinary the work of the Catalan sculptor/artist Jaume Plensa...

Highlights? The gently tinkling curtain of metal letters spelling out quotations in several languages, and the huge luminous and silent heads on a sea of silvery white cobbles (I wanted to sell up and move in permanently), along with acres of meadow and barley, lakes and grottos, woods and windy ridges... Oh, and liquorice ice-cream to help settle the large tub of popcorn we'd nibbled all the way through Harry Potter the night before.


So this is the final page of A (long) Week in My Life. I'm still reflecting on the experience of it, and where to put the extra journalling as I print it for my album. If you too have done this project, or a similar one, using digital pages, I'd love to know if you converted it to a hybrid one, and how ... I suspect mine is going to involve a lot of white card by Friday (especially as I suspect that Himself would like a rather larger photo of his leporine friend than I have allowed for so far). In the meantime, here's hoping your midweek is motoring along merrily, and your crafting is comfortably on cruise-control. I don't think mine has even got into first gear yet ... :).

 

Nearly done ...

If I don't finish this soon, it's going to feel like a month in my life, not seven days! The two hundred photos from the weekend of sculpture, culture and popcorn are still awaiting fully organising, but this is ready to share:

Thank-you for all your thoughts on Friday on how you journal. It's intriguing how many of us seem to start out with one idea which somehow changes and develops a life of its own in the tapping of the keys or the moving of the pen across the paper ... poetry and story in motion :). Which takes me back to the weekend, but you might have to wait till Wednesday! Warm regards to you all...

WIML (Sunday 31 July 11)

Those of you who pop in regularly will have met, in a manner of speaking, Himself. Often he has a subsidiary role on here, a prompter, a backroom boy. Well, today he's stepping forward in this page of A Week in My Life (Sunday 31st), and I hope you'll send him a smile and a wave as he opens his presents, plays with his new camera, and lets me photograph him on our walk - amply demonstrating points 3 and 1 of Remember below, and of course 7. :) Happy mid-weeking!

A centenary for WOYW (9 March 2011)

I know. I can hear you all from here. "Is that really your work desk?" "Have you tidied up specially?" No, actually, it often looks like this. Being a simple soul, I can only focus on one thing at a time, alas. I regularly envy the glorious desks I visit, cornucopias of gorgeous colour and shape and texture accessed at The Stamping Ground, with the lovely Miss Julia. But right now, this is as good as mine is going to get - the next spread in my This is 2011 album, with the pages from the second half of February. A bit of a hybrid again, with a striped pocket (paper is KI Memories, I think) holding bits from my birthday bash, and some journalling ... 

Here's the desktop version before I printed the left-hand side onto card, and the images onto silk photopaper. To ring the changes from previous pages, the text and pictures are reversed, I've rounded the corners for variety, narrowed the strips of colour on the journalling bands and deepened the colours on the strips this time in lieu of making them paler. (Bother, just seen a spelling mistake! Resisting the temptation to reprint ...). The taupe-coloured card behind the photos features here because on its reverse is the page celebrating Gladys; my pages are two-sided in this album.

 And as I am a hundred-posts-old today, I'd just like to say a heartfelt thank-you to all of you who come and visit, read along, converse with me, or just pop in and sit on the porch for a while. I am gladdened and honoured by your company. :) Wishing you Wonderfulness On Your Wednesday ...

WOYW (2 March) and a psd

On my workdesk today? Well, there are two today: a wooden one and a digital one. The former shows a work in progress - a double-page spread covering the second half of February, for my album This is 2011. Just some quick work with the Bind-it-all, a splodge of two or Herma and a pocket left to make - hybrid is, I think, my natural default setting. Below the photo, from my digital desktop, I'm adding the template I designed for January as downloadable zipped psd. files for anyone who is doing a weekly or monthly page or two, and would like to experiment with it - or anyone who just wants to play!

Should there be any problem, please leave me a message or send me an email and I'll do my best to help out (I may not be able to reply till next week). If you create anything with it, then do send me a link! It comes in two parts: the left-hand side of the double-page spread, and the right. The latter is more layer-heavy, so may take a little longer.

Download ThisIs2011TemplateAlexa01Left.psd
Download ThisIs2011TemplateAlexa01Right.psd

Right, off to see what wonderfully varied creative desks are awaiting around the world today, through the inventive Julia at The Stamping Ground. Fancy an explore?

Frustration rules OK ...

 It was my creative friend Sian's post this week that got me thinking. About style, being in and out of comfort zones, whether we have a recogniseable style or not, or are still looking ...

Flicking back through the albums and pages I'd made before I learnt how to design on the computer, I had a sudden hankering to start with a photo again, and pull together papers, card, bits and pieces, and see where it went. I thought, quite excitedly, that I could seek out multiple patterns (goodness knows, I have plenty of them!), find the boxes of brads, and do physical things like punch holes noisily and shout 'Sorry!' Could I even (sharp intake of breath) put things at wonky angles?

This is what transpired. Not very wonky, or very patterned, as it turned out, though I did try hard with the any-which-way stitching. it's the story of my Mum and bear from last week ...

The rest of the journalling is hidden: the large tab pulls it out. I'm still not sure about those free-floating leaves, and may well go and gently ease them off. I think they're too big. I need a smaller punch to make leaves about the size of the patches on the soles Teddy's feet.

Did I enjoy it? Well, yes and no. Yes to the pleasure of handling some real things. That was fun. No to the chaos I seemed to generate around me and the sheer length of time it took me to try things out, change my mind, peel things off, rearrange bits ... I get torn between the creative satisfaction I know awaits completing the page, or at least finally realising what it needs and how to get it to make visual sense, and the frustration of experiencing the room in a mess, that's it's already very late, and that I really need to go to bed.

And you? What do you get frustrated about during creative endeavours, or does it all flow seamlessly and enjoyably? I am really hoping I am not alone!

A quartet with some fuzzy thinking ...

Hello! No, we've not gone all musical up here (though a tuneful ditty in praise of Fridays would be welcome): we're a bit more visual today. If you can see clearly, that is ...

One
I promised a photo of how my all-in-one 'This is 2011' is developing. Though the covers are still in progress (that's an optimistic euphemism, by the way), the pages are held in an open spiral for the moment. Book-rings will keep things together once the covers are ready until there are enough pages to bind. I'm not - and I realise this may be heresy for some - using any page protectors, though I may trim some into single sheets and slip them in between pages if I sense any stickiness.

Two
To make the best use of resources, the backs of the double-page fortnightly spreads also hold a layout. Here, a page was glued onto the back after printing the spread but - with careful planning - it will be possible to print onto the back of the spread should this be needed.

Three
The New 52 skinny pages are printed directly onto double-sided white, matt, archival quality A4 art paper. Made especially for fine art and digital art printing, both Fotospeed's High White Smooth Duo and Hahnemuehle's Fine Art Inkjet paper give excellent results with no bleeding through of colour from one side to the other. Additionally, it's slimmer than two lots of card, which is a bonus. When you count the cost of, say, two sheets of Bazzil card plus A4 Photopaper by makers like HP or Epson, then the art papers compare favourably. And it's a whole lot simpler ...

Four
Fuzzy photos. Not having got to grips with the SLR, I snapped these of my little grandson in winter evening indoor light with no flash and a point-and-shoot camera. Naturally, being two, he was not going to stop moving while I fiddled around! Now, I know photos like these are often discarded as not being good enough; my dilemma is that sometimes they're all I have. And so, I'm thinking - albeit a trifle fuzzily - it seems more important to have some kind of record than perhaps none at all. (And - as a protective measure in on-line work - fuzzy or blurry photos make identification harder.)

Oh, and speaking of photos ...
though hers are not at all fuzzy!, then do have a look at Kim's lovely work, tutorials and classes over here. I've just found her site, and if you are beginning in Photoshop/Elements, or would like to try out textures and photos, this looks like a great place to learn. As I am already experimenting with backgrounds, I will be doing Kim's great free class Learn Textures in Ten. (Yes, that's ten minutes!) See you there? Or back here next week? Happy photo-taking and crafting ...

Keeping up with ...

... well, not the Joneses, but myself. I am determined this year not to 'meet myself coming backwards', as my grandmother expressively used to say.  Here's how the first fortnightly spread for January, in my 'This is 2011' album, has turned out:

Loving simple pages, I also need a simple process this year. Here's what I tried:

• setting up a template in advance - I love designing these.
• every few days during the fortnight, selecting a photo, dropping it in, and writing a heading plus a brief comment on a coloured strip - this took only 5 or 10 minutes at a time.
• typing in the main block of journalling at the end of the fortnight.
• getting it off the computer and into something tangible by printing the right-hand page and the photos, and preparing it for the album (covers yet to make).

 

Did it deliver what I hoped? Yes. When life was very busy, it only took small amounts of time to keep the pages moving forward and I enjoyed the sense of keeping up with documenting my days. It flowed along quite nicely.

Would I do anything different? Yes, again. Printing out the photos and trimming them individually, then reassembling them carefully with even spacing is not for me - or at least, not for this part of my album. On Saturday, my lovely crop-friend Karen (posting at UKScrappers as KJJC) watching me and my repositionable glue make a botched job of it, recommended a T-square to remove the stress, and suggested that printing them all on one page was - well - taking the fun out of it ... However, reprinting onto a single sheet when I got home and sticking the whole lot down with a few swipes of Herma was, frankly, blissful in comparison! Apologies to all of you with skill and patience and the ability to use glue with elegant flair - but I really need simple right now. :)

Anyone else documenting their year? How is it going? Please feel free to add a link below, or a comment, so we can come and visit!

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(For those of you who are interested in the technical aspects, the pages are 24x30cms, printed onto smooth white card, with the photos printed onto half a sheet of Ilford Galerie silk photo-paper A3+. My HP Photosmart 750 is creaking a bit but still functioning in the main, and allows for printing larger pages. These would work equally well resized for an A4 printer.)