trimmingthesails

The energy of stuff ...

And with such of a lot of it around, spilling out of one room into another at this point in the remodelling of our home, I am realising how much energy is associated with stuff - all kinds of stuff ... How it gets humped from room to room, drawer to table, shelf to floor and back again as the demands of the build require. Just as on the scrapbook page, an item has its own energy which pulls the eye and interacts with our emotions and thoughts, the same is true of life off the page as well as on it. Multiply this for every item, as well as the myriad interactions between items, and stuff shouts at us, clamouring vociferously for attention. And that's just the visual variety - there's plenty of other kinds of stuff around too ...

So I am going to take a little break next week, and attend to it. Rather than put all this stuff back into my life, I am taking time to sift through, let go, make space and room to breathe, and simplify. I may feel re-energised, or calmer, or neither of these but something else: right now, that doesn't seem to matter. And I love the fact that there is an echo in the starkness outside too, a lean stripped-back bareness against the winter sky. Like this view, captured quickly on the way back from work this week ...

Wishing you all a peaceful week as November gently slips away into December, and looking forward to seeing you again on the 6th. With warm good wishes, as the temperatures sink and the snow begins to fall softly across the hills ...

Not ...

... long now, the builder said brightly! Really? The end is in sight? Not how we are experiencing it, I have to say. But Photoshop and some layers have helped to make the photos look somewhat prettier, though the words convey something more approaching the truth:

Prettier on the inside anyway; the outside is quite a different matter. More nots ... As a clutch of renderers sit gloomily in their van watching the rain, can we just say to you all on site that it is not going to be fine that the very expensive through-colour render insisted on by the architect and planners (and which is only half-covering the building at present) is not white but a putty colour? It really is not OK to be told at this point that it would 'probably' (do you mean 'possibly'?) go white eventually but would take between six and twelve months to dry out. In this very wet area, supposing it doesn't? Ever? And we were not consoled, dear architect, builder and renderers, by the trio of shifty glances between you all. Still, that's a whole other scrapbook page to be getting on with, as we pile on the jumpers and half-fingered mitts, and pop some buckets underneath the drips ...

Hoping that your world is warm, bright and light, today! Ours? Well, I think the layout title says it all ... :)

Catching the moment ...

Sometimes the most unprepossessing camera shots, taken swiftly and on the spur of the moment, capture a fleeting moment of little consequence at the time. Later (sometimes much later) their own vibrant meaning emerges  - like those childhood painting-books, in which a brushful of water swiped across a plain page reveals the softly coloured picture beneath the surface...

Amy this week pointed us in the direction of Nicole's blog and - given the building disasters of this week when my brain appears to have frozen in mush - I was glad to have this lovely sketch and challenge as a focus:

Here is my take on it - a few quick snaps on a sunny September afternoon which even now makes me smile with renewed pleasure, and quickens my flagging energy:

Hoping you have a happy and creative weekend! Mine will be spent in a close encounter with plaster, paint, a shopping list and a very long trek around the kitchen section of an Ikea warehouse. See you next week?

Inside and Outside: WOYW Wednesday

Welcome to my workdesk and desktop today! The inside bit started like this ...

As I continue to clear out the weight of years past, I am having to make some firm decisions about those things to which I say 'thank-you and goodbye', and those which remain and in which form. After much hesitation, I decided to keep a very small fraction of work from a previous career - that which represented the best of what I'd done - as a way of bearing witness to and honouring part of my life which is no longer. Since I have very uncomplicated A-Z filing system, I needed a new section for it - hence the card and inexpensive manila folders above which form the backbone of my simple organisation.

If you're interested, here's what happened next. If not, you might just prefer to skip to the photo at the end! Cutting a manila folder in two down the spine, both covers are then trimmed to a little larger than A4 (the standard size in the UK) so as to allow for inserting any clear plastic folders I might need. The scrapbooking papers were cut next to the same size, the outside corners rounded (to avoid becoming dog-eared), and then glued to the two manila covers. I find this a great way to use up paper I've bought which I realised I will probably never use on a scrapbook page, and the back is frequently a different paper - as here - to the front. Then ...

And the outside bit? The photo below is on my desktop. You might remember an autumnal picture of our landscape up here from a few weeks ago?  Yesterday, it has changed again: winter shapes are starker, silhouettes darker, the light cooler ...


Is winter arriving with you yet, this mid-November Wednesday, or are you still in the full glory of autumn?

Minding The Ps and Qs

My grandmother used to say it: "Mind your Ps and Qs!" I was never quite sure why. Or even what they were - though Wikipedia has a few suggestions over here. Inspired by Sian's great post A Few Fs for Fursday, we (me and Himself) have had a few of our own Ps and Qs this weekend ...

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P for Panic (as in Total Panic) when The Architect decided on Friday, out of the blue and without any consultation, to call a halt to all work on the extension so that a load of cavity drip trays could be inserted into the walls of the existing house. Thousands of pounds of additional expense - ours, not his. Apparently he woke up in the night and thought it might be a good idea. I've been wondering if some sleeping pills might make a nice Christmas pressie.

Q for Querying and Questioning (as in Querelously) by us and the builder as this would mean two additional weeks' work when the build is five weeks late already, no hope of finishing and getting my parents in by Christmas, the bags of render outside in the drive going off and having to be paid for twice and the renderers - booked for Monday - compensated. Plus the real prospect of the front walls collapsing when they knock holes in the already soft and open-to-the-elements blockwork to insert said drip trays. That'd be additional Ps for Propping up the Place with big Poles, then.

P for Pardon? (as in Pardon-You've-Got-To-Be-Joking) when the smiley kitchen people told us it would cost us £740 to have four pieces of worktop fitted by their installers. No, that was in addition to the cost of the worktops themselves (which are less than half of that). They sent us off to their nice cafe with vouchers for a free cup of coffee to think about it. The thinking took less time than the drinking.

Q for Quandary (as in Quite a ...) when it was discovered that the two missing external doors which didn't turn up with the rest of the door-and-window order would be further delayed. A lot. Because they'd forgotton to make them. But we'll put them on a priority order for you. That'll mean only two months till they're ready.

P for Polishing Off (as in Pouring down one's throat) a bottle of best plonk. It was surprisingly good at numbing the pain. Nuther bottle, anyone? Hiccup.

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(What happened? The Architect has backed down, the builders have heaved a sigh of relief, the worktops we will fit ourselves (Himself is delighted at the prospect of purchasing a circular saw for the job - an additional toy tool he's wanted to play with for ages); and the doors will be supplied more quickly by someone else. But I wouldn't stop holding your breath just yet, if I were you. I'm not. Though holding your breath and trying to swallow two Neurofen at the same time is no mean feat ...)

 

4 on Friday (14)

Just a bit of fun, sun and colour today. Up here in the grey, blustery world outside and the grey, frustratingly unfinished inside, this week's 4 on Friday celebrates the quirky, the relaxed and the d'you-know-so-what? feeling of a recent holiday in the west of Ireland...

As we face yet more delays to the building work (now, there's a misnomer), it feels good to connect with something light-hearted and upbeat. Though if anyone has a spare cannon, please send it this way. :)

WOYW Wednesday

Pardon? said Himself. What does that stand for? Wring Out Your Washing? Wipe Over Your Worktops? Whingeing Over Your Weetabix?  Yes, well, whingeing on Wednesdays is not unknown in this house. However, Julia started it over here, the What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday. And on mine today? Well, here you go ...



Not a lot, as you can see. Mind you, that's partly because I am, as Julie spotted and as her kind gift of a badge to me simply states, a ...



The other work surface does not, alas, have anything crafty on it ...



... but bears witness to the kitchen planning which is having to absorb my time yesterday and today and, possibly, tomorrow: DIY rules OK here. However, for ten minutes every so often, I am escaping into the world of digital design, and preparing papers for my Book of December Days. Here's a glimpse of a fragment of a practice one in progress ...



This won't be the colourway, but I am learning new things and - in the midst of the chaos and inactivity on the building site we currently live in - learning is an energising and positive act of faith! Perhaps that should be With Optimism You Win Wednesday ... :)

Hey!

How do you decide which photos or stories to scrap? Have you got a rationale, or is it just random? This weekend, after Skyping with my Big One and his Little One, I had a real urge to go back and look again at the photos we took this year of our visits to them. And I realised that, hey! I sometimes scrap a photo just in order to feel connected again, to have a sense of a presence, to hear the sound of a voice, giggle or laugh, to remember the scent of skin, the feel of someone I love close to me. Like this little chap below - well, both chaps, really. And the "Hey!"? Well, Little One had just learnt to say it and took great delight in producing it so perfectly at just the right moment - and the photos below made me smile all over again... Hope you enjoy them as well!

Hoping you have a few moments and some photos to connect to happily today, too!

White space - 4 on Friday (13)

 Heard of Before and After magazine? Designing without photos, using only text, was the challenge offered recently to John McWade, the magazine's founder and designer. It piqued my interest. Shimelle's current class focuses on journalling, and I've been pondering - like you have, perhaps, at some time? - photo-less pages. Where do you put the text? How much of it? What else do you put on if you haven't got a photo?

Now John is not (to my knowledge) a scrapbooker, but one of his points struck a chord and I did some mock-ups of my own. A page like this one below has lots of text - plenty of potential for telling a story.

However, that's all you notice: the page behind is just a carrier for the text. It's barely visible. John's solution? Borrow white space from it, and make this into a design element of its own. The page now has two visual elements: the text and the (white) space around it.

 

To the eye and the brain, this is much more restful and more satisfying to look at, says John. Does it have the same effect on you? Or does it not matter? I liked this idea, and incorporated it into my 4 on Friday: two sections of journalling, the third above (the line and the embellishment) and the fourth below (the stripy strip), with the journalling centred and plenty of white space for it to breathe. And since my wardrobe and I are currently engaged in a battle of nearly epic proportions, I thought I'd share the story with you here ...

 

And a double mention here of things you might like. Someone whose lovely scrapbooking work makes excellent use of design, in the best tradition of simple scrapbooking is Giselle: do go and take a look at This and That, and scroll down to see some great pages ... And are you a bibliophile? Go and have  a look at Kel's video about books on her Journal Journeys - hoping it makes you smile, too. Happy browsing and happy weekending!

Journalling with memory flashes ...

Memory flash 1 ...
Oooh, I thought this morning - there's a neat idea for journalling. No anxiety about finding the right word, devising beautifully-crafted phrases, or creating balanced paragraphs. No grammar or punctuation problems like: "Is it OK to have a sentence without a verb?" or "Where does the comma need to come here?" or "Should this be a colon or semi-colon?" It's called a memory flash. Just a series of words, feelings, thoughts, sensations all spilling out in a stream-of-consciousness fashion and, according to Relly Annett-Baker (writing for Shimelle's class True Stories), the closest we can get to letting people inside our heads. Braving the fear that if people could get inside mine, they might say things like "Wow! You can see for miles in here!", I toyed with the idea of having a go - should the occasion present itself. Which it probably wouldn't.

Returning from work, I ran straight into the next phase of construction destruction to our home which will enable my not-so-well parents to come and live with us. This is what happened next ...

 I'm fine now. Just a wobble. (But even wobbles deserve to be journalled?)

And memory flash 2 ...
No, I hadn't forgotton I promised these. I did remember. Here are the zip files containing the .psd templates (for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements) - the lower four shown on the page map for my Book of December Days. I think I caught the typos this time round.

A4
Download AlexaDecDays05-08(A4)
Letter (8.5x11)
Download AlexaDecDays05-08(LT)

Throat dry push door to kitchen yielding fumble for switch feel teabag soft between fingers ... Oh, this could be addictive! For goodness sake, get a grip, girl! Just go and put the kettle on ...