trimmingthesails

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. :)

This is 2011 (March 1-15)

OK, so I'm a trifle behind!  but valiantly attempting to catch up. These pages from my "This is 2011" album are mostly about our visit to see our lovely son and daughter-in-law and their two little ones: the highlight of the whole month.

I could probably have made half-a-dozen scrapbook pages of this trip, but this year I am experimenting with keeping it simple, and the album manageable in size. Blending some photos together was a trial, in more ways than one, but an alternative to lots of smaller ones. I'm not totally sure about it, but it's staying as testament to my fortitude! The paper is a digital one, and the flowers are mine. As a lover of pockets and flaps and hideaways of all kinds, I'm going to find space within these two pages for additional photos and journalling, but without adding too much bulk. and will share the results on here - though it may take me a week or so.

In the meantime, here it is. In reality, it's a little brighter than this, but I'm having difficulty getting it to reproduce more accurately: the greens are either slightly subdued like this, or an eyeball-hurting neon.


Oh, and the green in the big photo is there because that's the shade of the wall behind DD and DGS. My son is not afraid of bold colour. Perhaps it was all those years of living with his mother's obsession with white at home - or her lack of creative imagination!

Here's to a happy weekend for us all ...

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?

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.)

Throwing away ...

And after the gentle rocking by the strong old woman through the long, dark night? (See Friday 7th January, story collected by Gloria Pinkola Estés). The old and weary man grew younger and younger, and became a small and very beautiful child with golden hair, plaited like wheat. Just as dawn broke, the old woman quickly plucked three hairs from the young child's head and threw them on the floor - and the child crawled down from the old woman's lap, paused at the door to give her a dazzling smile, then flew up into the sky to become the brilliant morning sun ...

The three hairs? They represent the need to throw away, to let go of some things or ideas before new energy can flow. In the quiet rocking, it's time 'to get right down to the bones of everything and anything in your life'. Those of you who visit regularly will probably smile, knowing that simplifying and letting go is music to my ears.

So although I am not yet done with musing and stillness, one hair that I am going to let go of, is the struggle to work out where everything in scrapbooking and journalling belongs in the welter of December, Christmas, Daily Life, My Holiday projects and albums. Should a journal be kept separate from the photo album? If a page has drawing, or paint or collage too, does that go in a writing journal or an art journal? Supposing it's got a few photos as well - is that the photo album, then? Water needs clear edges to flow, or it will sink away into shallow, swampy, silted fringes ...

It's all going in one place this year. One chunky, richly-textured volume, with pockets, flaps and hiding places for more private work, and spreads, inserts, and booklets for photos and journalling which record the year. There'll be room for fabric work, digital work, anything where creative energy flows. On the front, it will simply say 'This is 2011'.

Ikea's catalogue (we've perused it often enough during the renovations!) is, aptly, providing a template: photos one side, journalling the other. I feel the creative juices gathering already ... Here's the template I've been making and playing around with:

By Monday, the first fortnightly spread will be done. There have been some queries about how I'm going to print and store the New 52 layouts - I'll include this too. Oh, and I love the serendipity of that catalogue page title 'What do you love?' That I can be clear about. Simplicity. :)