trimmingthesails

Weighing anchor ...

It's Friday, and almost time to weigh anchor here. So ...

• goodbye to work, constant rain, and cold bones, for we're heading off to spend a little time with our lovely son and daughter-in-law and two delightful little ones. (Thanks, family, for holding the fort here). There may be some photos on our return, so if you prefer to visit child-free blogs you might need to give me a miss for a few days :).

• au revoir to my companions in Alisa's Ode To Nature class, for I will be sad not to see your wonderful creative efforts unfolding in the final week but will be catching up as soon as I can.

• hasta la vista, very temporarily, to an unexpected blog gift. The winning of Elizabeth Dillow's Meaningful Minis via Wilna's and Elizabeth's generosity was a cheering spot in the gloom of yesterday and I'm looking forward to reading it and trying out the ideas. I'm not noted for my minibooks but I do have a holiday spread where, thanks to a bunch of them, I fitted in over 100 photos. Have I not shown you this one? No? Ah, to be continued!

• arrividerci computer, for you are not coming with us. Sorry. The space you take up is already booked by a cohort of Crackerbreads, Cadbury's chocolate, Heinz Salad Cream and Marmite: the needs of ex-pats rule OK in the suitcase-packing department.

•  Aufwiedersehen larger pieces of watercolour paper - though I am planning to take your smaller relatives in my creativity-on-the-move pack, and do some final planning for a regular "Mid-Month Moment", beginning here in September. (You might even like to join in). This piece however, finally painted, is staying put ...

(And yep, I did fill the whole page, though the pale blue wash behind the honeysuckle is - yes indeed - very pale. I've included some close-ups so you can see that I can't paint inside lines even with my glasses on.)

• so that's "See you soon?" from me to you, with many thanks for all your lovely comments and encouragement; and I'm hoping you have a wonderful week sailing into September ...

Midweek mulling over ...

Hello there! You find me, midweek, in a bit of a tangle over white space. On the one hand, as a clean and simple scrapbooker, I love it. It makes my heart sing. I am delving happily into the new book on my desk "White Space is Not Your Enemy" with gay abandon - though this sentence, italicised at regular intervals, is beginning to grate just a smidgen. Wouldn't "White Space is Your Best Friend" be a more soothing and, well, amicable mantra?

On the other hand, in Alisa's Ode to Nature class, the activity this week is to fill a whole page in colour. All of it. Every last bit. And I am in a blue white funk. Which colours? You mean, the entire background as well? Supposing I'm halfway through and don't like it? Covering the watercolour paper with my doodley honeysuckle was fun, but I confess to quite liking monchrome...

Hopefully by Friday, I'll have worked something out - probably by trial and with plenty of errors. Mind you, I've spotted one or two of the latter in the aforementioned book. (Have editors gone out of fashion?) Somebody please tell me I'm not alone in thinking that the placeholder text Lorem Ipsum is Latin and not, as the authors claim, Greek.

But I procrastinate. Time to take a deep breath and load a brush with pink. Wish me luck, everyone!

Next up ...

"You'll be sure and show my getting up to the very top?" I was reassuring.
"And you'll show the bit where I go up with ladder with the brushes over my shoulder?" Indeed I would. I was quite emphatic.
"Oh, and you won't forget that photo in front of the stove?" Nope, not going to forget a thing, I promised. Heroic efforts deserve plenty of praise. And true to my word, here they are. Very many thanks to Paula at live.scrap.repeat for the book cover inspiration and her own splendid version (better than the original!). Without more ado ...

With the leaves beginning to change colour and a nip in the air, I am off - most appreciatively - to light that fire.  Hello, Almost Autumn!

What you can't see ...

What you can't see ...
Painting leaves is a bit of a challenge. Seriously. You'd think that stroking some watercolour across the underside of a leaf and pressing it onto paper would be child's play. For a start, leaves are, er-r-r, waterproof: paint forms little beads and runs off before you can whip the leaf upside down. Unless you're Alisa :). So it was splotches and splodges all round. Sometimes what emerges is only half a leaf ...

As I scanned the page, nibbling the end of my brush, that's when I realised. In the midst of the painty wateryness, I'd been mulling over Sian's thoughtful post at From High in the Sky, and one of the questions Sian is pondering is how much of oneself to reveal in a blog. Does 'telling all', for example, make one more 'real' than not? Among the leaves I'd painted and pressed, the one I liked best was the half-print: the edges that were uneven, the ribs of fresh green fading away into white, the suggestion of another, unseen, part that was both there and not there, implied but not visible ... but nonetheless real. I think I found my own response. Who'd have guessed there would be so much to learn from a leaf!

What you can see ...
You were wondering, some of you, about how the natural items in my pages hold up? I wasn't quite sure if you meant how to get them to stay on the page, or their longevity :). As you'll see from the montage below, the answer to the last bit is 'just fine'. Grasses and leaves will probably lurk on my desk or window ledge for at least a few days before they're scrapped, so any moisture will have evaporated nicely. The layouts on yesterday's post were made between four and six years ago.

As for how to get them to hold up on the page, my reply would be 'with anything to hand, and whatever suits the page': a bit of string, a thin sliver of mica and a couple of brads, even a swipe with some Herma to keep a leaf flat. Whatever is simplest or most fun for you, and whichever of those is your priority at the time! Hoping that whatever your weekend brings, there's time for some simple fun ...

Collecting and recollecting ...

You'd have thought it would be easy, wouldn't you, collecting things on a nature walk? And it's true, strolling along in the early sunshine picking different types of grasses was gently soothing and restorative. Composing an arrangement of them, though, for Alisa's Ode to Nature class? Oh my, verging on the stressful! All the same way up? Top-to-toe? How to balance the shades of greens, soft wheat and tawny brown? Overlapping? Equal spacing? Fill the gaps? What kind of background? How best to photograph? So many questions! A lot like designing a scrapbook page, in fact ...

 And it put me in touch with earlier pages where grasses, picked at the time of taking the photographs, found a place alongside the prints and the journalling ...

I love to do this: including a little bit of nature stitches the memories to a particular time and place as if to say, "This really happened; look! I'm here with you now, and I was there then!"

Perhaps it's in the genes. My father recollected the other evening that an ancestor of ours was a President of a Field Naturalist Society, and that his own father (my grandfather) would never set off on a walk without a specimen jar or a little glass case. Another piece of history to collect ... So perhaps there is some logic to my having chosen this class: a thread that runs through my family's story and surfaces every so often. I just hope he was good at art: I understand that keeping a field journal in this class comes next!

Well, it's the height ...

... of summer (or in my case, summer madness) multiplied by three today...

For a little while now, I've been wanting to salute some blog friends by:

• making a contribution to Julie's entertaining series, The Height of Summer
• following Paula's clever lead in using a movie ad as a page design at live.scrap.repeat
• finding a film poster for my attempt at item 18 on Rinda's imaginative Scavenger Hunt

Will this do triple duty?

The truth behind that shocking image? It was a very tall sundial. Taller than me, in fact, by several inches, and I'm five foot two and a half (and yes, that half does matter!). Goodness knows who was supposed to check the angle of our watery sunlight: I'm standing on my tippy-toes.

And thank-you for all your kind support on the Ode to Nature front. I am about a week behind, but have the prospect of nature walks and collecting things to enjoy, with an umbrella and wellies, probably: our height of summer is, alas, filled with lows here, meterologically speaking. As I splash merrily in puddles and reach into rain-drenched hedgerows, what's your week looking like?

 

A warty start ...

It's a trifle busy up here in the hills this week, but I made a clutch of discoveries in Alisa's Ode To Nature class: I am ...

• resisting the temptation to remove the title-page from the journal. It buckled with the paint. And the half-dozen behind it. Yikes.

• press-ganging encouraging myself to work directly onto paper with no opportunity to re-do bits or cover them up with other bits. Bother!

• chuffed that using the Bind-it-All to punch holes, then make a scissor-snip from the edge to each hole, means that yes, it is possible to insert a sheet of watercolour paper in the journal. Yeay!

• gradually shifting from a clean-and-simple angle, to a what-the-heck, warts-and-all one. Wow!

And oh my, do we have warts ...

Carla Sonheim's gesso-burst 'abstracted flowers' were a lot of fun to do - you'll find her wonderful tutorial here and her great online class over here. There's such a freedom in not minding too much about 'mistakes'. I'm a little afraid I'll get so warty, it'll start to creep into my clean-and-simple scrapbooking. :)

Ode to Ode to Nature ...

 If you've ever thought "I need a change,
a challenge - hey, that class looks fun!"
Then listen up, my blogging friends,
And I'll show you how it's really done.

First of all, you mustn't check
Your diary or consider how
You'll fit it into your busy life.
Just take a breath, and hit "Pay Now".

Then, next, forget you've ever signed up.
That way it comes as a big surprise
When the 'Welcome' mail lands in your box
And you've done bu_ _ er all about getting supplies.

Never mind, whizz over to the online group,
Sign in, say hi, bookmark and chat,
Learn names, visit blogs, and bit by bit
It dawns on you, to your chagrin, that ...

These lovely people aren't beginners like you,
They've loads of skills, they're really clever,
They can stitch, paint, design, draw, sketch and knit
And unlike you, they've been doing it for ever.

But don't despair, you have got a choice:
You can manfully join in, and simply not care
That anything you make looks like the cat brought it in,
"It's a learning curve, peeps, I'm doing it for a dare,

I'm only here to make you all look good."
Or you might think "Nah, it's too big a risk,
I'll do a Br'er Fox, lie low, say nuffin,
And file it all away on that nearly-full disk ...

... with all the other classes I've not quite done!
(Let's face it, there's probably quite a range).
And then one day you'll hear yourself say:
"You know, I think I need a change ..."

I've got as far as the title page,
With a bit of doodling, and some painty fun,
Still, plenty of time yet to welch out of this class,
We've only got to the end of Week One!

So we'll go no more a-roving ...

... sighed Lord Bryon - but Himself and I aren't quite ready to join him yet. In the story of our weekend, (thanks, bro!), we roved aplenty ...

• lunched in the company of a bronzed gentleman in the courtyard of the wonderful Beetroot Tree Gallery and admired their cosy indoor seating right beside a clutch of pretty bags and scarves
• pondered the equinine garb on our way to the river (any idea what it's for?)
• chortled our way through a sparking performance of the Mikado (with the Three Little Maids and the Lord High Exectutioner)
• snapped the approaching rainstorm on the way back from our walk
• caught up finally after a long gap with a much-loved friend
• admired the shadows at our feet
• bought some postcards of Ingrid's lovely work
• indulged in panacotta-and-wild-berry ice-cream back at the gallery, in the their secret garden - after Himself had a head-shaving encounter with some hanging scultures

I'm wondering whether to join Rinda's intriguing Scavenger Hunt: items to be captured seem to be crossing my path serendipitously - or is it just a case of selective attention after reading the list? Oh, and we did fit in a long walk in the early morning sunshine ...

And if you're wondering whether I succumbed to temptation in the gallery's art and craft supplies section, I am going to have to confess to purchasing ... Hmm, I might be using it by Wednesday, so can I fill you in then? Happy Monday-ing :).

She shuffles seashells ...

... along the shingly sea shore. (Did you try saying that fast?). At least, she likes to when she gets the chance. Luckily the annual family reunion (Himself's) a few weekends ago was on the coast, but I haven't caught up with scrapping the photos. Still, a simple cover page is done, the design inspiration for which was seized during another spell in a waiting room and a glossy magazine or two ...

Hoping that those of you who shared at the start of the week that you were heading for holidays, wind-downs and nice times with family are happily almost there, that anything to do with school is well tucked out of sight for a while, and that radios are blaring something cheerfully companionable :). Here, we are looking forward to the arrival of a brother for the weekend, the chance for Himself and yours truly to get our walking boots on, and an outing for us all with some memorable moments, magical melodies, mincing maids and a hopefully not-too-close encounter with a Lord High Executioner (eeek!). Meet you back here on Monday?