Paper Obsession

Journal Your Christmas - three sleeps away!

Monday 1st December marks the start of 'Journal Your Christmas' 2008 which will, no doubt, become my obsession for the month of December and beyond. JYC is an annual online class by Shimelle (details here) which started five or so years ago and now seems to have hundreds of followers all over the world. This is my first year and I, like so many others, have been itching to get started for weeks. The online forum is buzzing with chatter about preparing for the class, who's using which patterned papers, and what makes this such an exciting class to participate in.

The idea is to reclaim your Christmas by setting aside a bit of time each day from 1st Dec through to 6th Jan to journal, blog or scrapbook on what the festive season means to you. Shimelle will be sending an email prompt every day containing suggestions on the focus for the day. There is no pressure to complete a scrapbook page every day - in fact I will be astonished if I manage to do that! But I will be trying to save an hour or so every day to jot down some thoughts, maybe even complete a super-quick layout as time allows. I have a gorgeous new 12"x12" album on my shelf and have even prepared a few pages ready to add photos and journalling - how organised is that?! 

Of course I have still to finish my Photography work-book and Portfolio - my last class of this unit is next Thursday and I would love to be able to hand in at least the work-book. The Portfolio, I fear, could take a bit longer..

Harry loves the hens

This is my second go at this post.. aaaargh! I will try and keep it snappy this time.

I have completed a scrapbook layout!

This shows Harry making a beeline for the hens at Christmas Tree Farm back in October. I was following close behind, torn between capturing him on camera and rescuing the hens from a vigorous patting. Luckily both Harry and the hens came away virtually unscathed.

The layout took remarkably little time (only a couple of hours) when I got down to it. After a lot of deliberating the night before, I decided to just Go For It, ripping and painting with gay abandon - very liberating! It might not be brilliant but it gave me hope that - one day - I might be able to scrap with a bit more freedom, without agonising over every part of the process.

As Shimelle says, 'There is no stress is scrapbooking.' I aspire to this, I really do!

Talking of Shimelle, I have just signed up to her Journal Your Christmas class. The idea is to document the run-up to Christmas and beyond by completing a page each day in December, up to the first week of January. Oh. My... How likely am I to complete this? I am nothing if not deluded.. But really, there is no pressure to do it all! I am going to try and get organised in advance, get the bare bones of a few pages together and get all my supplies organised, and then just do what I can. I am really looking forward to getting stuck in - reading the comments of others who have done the class before, it seems to be a fun and fulfilling class.

Enough for now.. I am itching to get scrapping.

Finished - A Portrait of my Home Town!

Tonight I have finally finished my mini-book 'A Portrait of my Home Town', a project I have been working on, intermittently, for months. In the end I decided to include only photos of Stroud Road, Ashburton and Addiscombe as the book was getting very fat indeed. I will save my Croydon photos for a second mini-book, perhaps when I have had a chance to find out a bit more about the fascinating buildings I photographed a few weeks ago.

I am especially pleased with the mini-book as I bound it using my not-so-new Bind-it-All machine. I have had the Bind-it-All sitting on my desk for several months, still in its box, just waiting for an opportunity to have a go, yet terrified I would make a hash of some precious project. Happily, I had no such disaster and it was actually really easy to use. Now I'm itching to make something else with it, and I have a few little projects in mind. Next project might well be a mini-book of summer flowers - I have a heap of pictures taken in the garden, Painshill Park, and Oxford Botanic Gardens which I want to compile into a pretty album.

Here are some photos of my first foray into the world of Bind-it-All.

My latest obsession

For the last week or so I have been busy trying to finish a mini-book I started months ago. It was part of Shimelle's online class, 'There's No Place Like Home', which I started way back in March I think. The mini-book I'm trying to complete was one of the first assignments, entitled 'A Portrait of My Home Town'. The idea was to take pictures of your home area (I chose to interpret this as where I live now, rather than where I was born) and compile them along with your memories and stories.

This week I have taken masses of pictures of Woodside, Ashburton, Addiscombe and Croydon town centre, to add to those I took back in early Spring. In doing so, I have discovered beauty in the new and the old in my surroundings. I have become pretty good at spotting photo opportunities wherever the boys and I happen to go on our daily jaunts. The trouble is, I have so enjoyed discovering little gems of old buildings around me that I have developed a new obsession - delving into the past. I've found some great books in the library about Old Croydon, filled with fascinating photographs from the 1960s and even as far back as the 1800s. Croydon is now so dominated by hideous concrete and glass tower blocks it's hard to imagine what it was like in the past.. but here and there are intriguing glimpses of another world.

 

Why Paper Obsession?

I can resist everything but temptation (to borrow a phrase).. especially when there's a huge warehouse sale on at Banana Frog.

On Thursday evening I succumbed to the lure of patterned papers at 29p and half price Banana Frog alphabet stamps, and my little haul arrived promptly this morning at 8.35am. Incredibly we were all still in bed as the postman rang the doorbell. I caught him just as he was about to pop a little red card through the letterbox. They really don't hang about.

So here it is! I have stroked it lovingly but it'll probably be a while before I actually get round to using it. Tonight I have been working on October '07 of Harry's baby album. It's coming on nicely but now I'm going to have to clear away the mess so that we have a useable dining table in the morning. Oh, for my very own craft studio..