trimmingthesails

Tip it sideways ...

... said Miss Smith in her Just One Sketch class. So I did - just to see what happened to my original sketch. Ninety degrees anticlockwise, and portrait morphs into landscape (in more ways than one). See far right? With the vertical strip of text above the Q and N? This seemed to work fine on the first (portrait) page, but I didn't think it looked good in landscape: a bit cluttered and clumsy. So on the principle of "If in doubt. take it out", I did ...

What do you think? Right decision? No, you'd have left it in? Why? All thoughts welcome - I do love a good natter about design! :)

 

Pass The Page - and it stops here!

Well, you are right up against the buffers - this is the terminus, and welcome!  If you've arrived here having jumped on at the last stop, The Station Master might just have to send you back to the booking office over at Julie's Letting The days Roll By for a ticket :). I hope you've enjoyed seeing how Julie's initial sketch has evolved as each of us in this imaginative Pass The Page Blop Hop has reinterpreted it. Just in case you arrived via a branch line or want to go back and revisit, the full list of stations looks like this:

Julie
Candace
Lea 
Helen (Beacon Crafts) and Lizzie
Sian
Clair 
Helen
Alison 
Ginger
Jemma 
Lisa-Jane 
Deb 

Deb's lovely version with its vintage feel  is here (don't you just love these pretty hair styles) ...

I love Deb's use of 'white' space, with a perfect paper for the era of her photo, and the grouping of the embellishments which pulls your eye to the central picture (not to mention all that careful cutting and matting!) and I wanted to honour those in a contemporary setting. (You might even notice that some of my papers are, in the modern fashion, 'wonky' - eek!). My take on Deb's looks like this:

 We both:

• focus on a single photo
• share a similar theme of a family group
• use the colours pink and blue, with some flowers
• incorporate a coloured border: Deb's around the photo, mine around the background
• slip a horizontal border behind the photo: I've used a scattering of beads
• cluster elements together: embellishments (Deb's), mats/tags (mine)
• add rounded edges: Deb in her bird and fruits and journalling spots, and I've softened the corners of the papers
• have two sections of journalling, one above the other
• like a large area of 'white' space

Thank-you, Deb! Julie, it has been great fun to do: thank-you to you too for all your hard work in setting it up, and many congratulations on its success. Hoping that all of you reading along, as well as our talented co-participants, have enjoyed it as well, and wishing you happy and creative times - full steam ahead to the weekend, toot-toooooot!

Quotes and Notes (for Miss Smith)

It might be fun, I thought, whilst taking Miss Smith's class Just One Sketch, to have a theme: something to pull the sketches together. And so Quotes and Notes was born: a collection of ... well, just what it says on the tin, quotes and notes, written with my (grown-up) children in mind. They might be favourite quotations and thoughts, or mini-stories from my and their Dad's lives they have not yet heard. They may even get a copy one day! In the meantime, here's the sketch from Monday, interpreted very simply...

Over the last three months, Julie of Letting The Days Roll By has been masterminding a group of us in a project called Pass The Page: a kind of scrapbooking Chinese Whispers, and this Friday at noon all will be revealed - to us as well as you, for we've only seen the page before our own! Please do join us in some hopping around the blogosphere to see how the initial design has evolved - I think there might even be some nice things to win.

Time for some tea and A Little Something, I think - though I might give the condensed milk a miss this time. :)

Cocktails, anyone?

Sunshine and cocktails ... The first words of the advert are enticing, and its colour draws you in: zingy lemon-yellow laid against steel grey, with a sliver of sharp orange to seal the deal. The design? Clean and stylish to the eye, with layers of subtlety underneath - just like a good cocktail, I'm thinking. Miss Smith has been encouraging those of us taking her Just One Sketch class to choose a design on which to base our soon-to-be-pages, and the advert has given me mine:


In preparation, we've also been asked to ponder the elements of our style. I rather like this defintion from 1806: "(A) cocktail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters" (bitters being a liquid not considered suitable for drinking by itself, made of herbs, fruits, spices and roots, which enhances the spirits). I think I might aspire to that for this class: a stimulating page, composed of images of any kind, words, white space and an embellishment. What d'you think?

So, that's the cocktails sorted :).  Sunshine, anyone?

OK, so you might not ...

... in the fresh energy of January, be contemplating any digital projects for recording daily or weekly life, or marking the unfolding of an aim or goals for this year. You might not even be thinking of doing any projects at all. But if you are, and it might just involve digital or hybrid, then please do help yourself to the layered digital templates below. Because drop shadows operate differently in Photoshop and PSE, do make sure you download the one you need.

Download 8.5and12GridsPhotoshop
Download 8.5and12GridsPSE

Just in case. You never know. And if you're dithering about digital, perhaps feeling a bit apprehensive (and I can remember what that feels like), I might have a little something in a week or so to help you get a foothold ...  :)

Thank-you for all your wonderful, inventive, and witty suggestions for scrapbooking products as part of Wednesday's post: I really enjoyed reading them and am pondering what we ought to do with them all! In the meantime, however glowering the clouds and fleeting the sunshine, up here this weekend we will be trying to get our feet into boots and head for the hills ...

 Warm good wishes to you wherever you are - see you Monday?

Dear Scrapbooking Manufacturers ...

Dear Scrapbooking Manufacturers,
As you will, no doubt, soon be deep into planning scrapbooking products for 2013, I wonder if I might offer some suggestions from my own recent experience which I think have real marketing potential?

1 A corner-rounder which, in order to get a nice curve around the edge of an admittedly thick card-and-grungeboard sandwich, does not give up and crack when you stand on it.

2 Cardstock which is edible and fruit-flavoured like jelly beans: yellows taste of lemon, blues of blueberry, oranges ... you get the picture. Oh, and with a zero calorie content. Waste would be greatly reduced and crops would be such fun. (NB Sheets of kraft should taste of wheat so they can be popped into a lasagne.)


3 Craft mats which do not buckle and bend like a road in an earthquake when you iron on top of them. (In my defence, do your products say 'Do not iron' on them anywhere?)

4 A braking device for the Spellbinder die-cutting machine. I am currently suffering from a close encounter between a chunky Sizzix die and my kneecap, following the swift ejection of the former from the said device. (Have you any figures for the velocity of this ferocious beast? Scaled up, I think it has real potential which might interest the Pentagon).

5 Money-off coupons towards one's next purchase of double-sided sticky tape, proportionate to the amount of time it took to get the supposedly-unsticky shiny strip off the previous one. Stamps towards a voucher for a manicure would be equally acceptable.

Hoping that you will give these suggestions serious consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you - just as soon as I can hobble to the postbox, and remove my tongue from my cheek.

Very best wishes,
Alexa

PS I am going to ask my kind and imaginative blog readers for some suggestions of their own, and will forward them in due course. Thanking you all for your kind attention. :)

Sometimes ...

I like sometimes. It doesn't have the often peremptory, accusatory or final ring of never or always. Sometimes is a little more forgiving.  It allows for possibilities. There's a softness to it: more hope. Though the wind was chill and old limbs tired and frail, we stopped for a brief walk along the ridge: Himself and Mum were out in front with the wheelie, Dad and I behind with my arm tucked into one of his. Through the hazy drizzle, the sun was breaking through, and gulls - tossed inland by the storms - wheeling across the fields below. With our free hands, Dad held his stick and I held my camera, snapping the occasional photo as we walked, and not expecting much. But here is what I saw when we arrived home, and here is what came to me ...

It's always a waste of time, I've said, taking photos on the move: I can never do anything with them. But perhaps sometimes, just sometimes ...

 

One little word ...

... and in 2011, mine was flow. It helped, much more than making resolutions, in all kinds of ways:

• I realised early that flow happens best where there are river banks, not flat swamps
• it gave me a visual image and an intuitive feel for how I wished to live through my days
• the sense of movement I could connect with gave me the energy to clear away debris and clutter
• walking near rivers and streams became ever more nourishing and affirming
• in those times where there were sudden landslips or boulders in my path, I would ask myself "To flow around or over this, what do I need to do or to say, how do I need to be?"

Truthfully, at the start of 2011, I wondered whether joining in with Ali Edward's One Little Word would be of use, whether I would sustain it, and whether I would do it again. As the year has ended, I am clear that it was, that I had and that I would ...

Flow helped shape how to react and respond; I sense that this year, I will need something more determined, more proactive. What has come to me has many personal echoes, including sadness and blocked flow, and I have avoided it for many years. Yet there is an energy in it which I can hear calling; so, with some apprehension and a shiver of nerves, I think now is the time to ...

And yes, I have even bought the shoes - it seemed a good place from which to pick up and begin again! Hoping that, as the first weekend of the new year approaches, you too will be feeling fresh energy and tinge of excitement ... And will you be choosing a word?

High and low ...

"Not bad for a low-tech relic", observed Himself, turning it over in his hands from which I hastily removed the topless felt-tip. "Not bad at all. Re-purposed. Though you'd be much better off with a PDA, of course. You'll wish you'd let me get you one for Christmas." An electronic Personal Data Assistant? I thought. Battery chargers, leads, endless 'have-you-seen-that-special-pointy-tool-for-my-PDA?". I don't think so.
"Actually, I don't think think it's technically repurposed, since it's still a diary", I mused.
"Upcycled!" exclaimed Himself, waving it in the air while I quietly slid the half-full coffee cup out of the way. He was clearly wishing to give my efforts a little more status than 'recycled'.
"I'm not sure Kelly Rae Roberts would agree with you", I replied. "I've just dismantled her 2010 original, interleaved it with the pages of an 85p diary from the Pound Shop, and whizzed it through my Bind-It-All. In my defence, her new one doesn't ship to the UK".

"What are the blank sheets for inbetween each diary page? And the pockets?" Himself asked. I reached out and gently halted his fingers from their energetic riffling of the contents.
"Notes, things to do, blog-post ideas, plans, a record of my days: a single place to capture all the things I'm thinking about so I don't have to carry them around mentally".
"Yes, but you're going to carry this around", he said, balancing it dubiously in the palm of his hand. I caught it deftly just as it toppled in the direction of the floor. "Wouldn't it be easier to just have it all in your head?"
"Haven't you heard of things weighing on your mind?" I asked mock-sternly.
Himself looked at me in his best Winnie-the-Pooh fashion. "I don't think programmers have those", he said, meekly. "It's all carefree cloud-computing where I am." The phrase head-in-the ... hovered in the air, but didn't quite make it. "Well, it's very nice", Himself concluded. "And there's even a place for your pen."
I thought I detected a whiff of 'How quaint", but let it go. I was just at the top of the stairs when the words floated up: "By the way, have you seen that special pointy tool for my PDA?"
Between you and me, I don't think I'll be wishing any time soon ... :).

There are some stories ...

 ... which fold themselves neatly into memory, like sheets stacked in an airing-cupboard waiting to be lifted out for use. There are others which billow and bulge, like a duvet or sleeping-bag refusing to be squeezed into its cover: these have been my December. The highs have been high, and lows very low. Still, it has felt good to be able to capture their flavour and frame them into two pages; good for things to be steadier, though still fragile health-wise, for my parents; good to stop living on the edge waiting for the next emergency; good to be reunited with my home and computer and sleep again ...

Thank-you to Julie for the numeric inspiration in the first column above - her own month of numbers is always enjoyable to read. This is but a very short story - there are many wonderful ones over at Sian's great Story-Telling Sunday, and hoping you'll be able to visit some of her tellers of tales. Sorry to have been away, and glad to be back: and wishing you all a joyful and creative year ahead.

Edited to add: thank-you to Jemma for letting me know the journalling was unclear - hoping the single page below is clearer. :)