osprey_archer | Entries tagged with scrapbooking

I posted a few weeks ago about an imminent watercolor class, which was then postponed, but happily it finally happened this Monday! So I spent three hours Monday evening learning about watercolors, and ended the evening with a watercolor of two fat birds which I have pinned to the bulletin board in my office. There was also a watercolor of an orange cat which was very cute right up until I added the eyes... somehow they are people eyes rather than cat eyes and give the whole thing a feel disturbingly like the Cats movie.

However, I will persevere! One of my watercolor goals is a portrait of a cat who I met in the Brooklyn Cat Cafe, as I would like to put her picture in my scrapbook (planning a spread called Cats at Work), but I currently have only a blurry video which will not screenshot well... Hopefully I can do Pink Salmon justice in watercolor. She deserves the tribute of a portrait rather than a mere photograph, anyway.

Scrapbooking progresses! Despite Baby Boy's interference (he knocked the table over RIGHT after I had finished laying out the pages...) I am finishing up the section for my thirtieth birthday party. It is ten pages long, which is longer than the spread for my entire 2017 road trip... Well, look, sometimes you just have more things to put in the scrapbook, you know? Not only are there more photos for the birthday party, but I'm putting in many of the birthday cards I received, as well.

Have begun work on my massive 2023 road trip. So far I have a better record than I feared, although to my dismay have have discovered that I have nothing from either (a) John K. King Books - not even a photo of the stack of books I bought! - or (b) the Boston Public Library, which was about 75% of my sightseeing in Boston. Oops. (This reminds me that I was planning to get a little cocktail umbrella and paint it black in honor of A Spy among Friends. Must add to list.)

Because it's so big, I've been sort of storyboarding the road trip pages. I stopped after Boston last weekend, but this weekend I'm hoping to get through the last few weeks of the trip - PEI, Belchertown, and Philadelphia for

skygiants and

genarti's wedding. (Which I also don't have pictures for! But I DO have pictures from the Rodin museum, including a miniature sculpture of a penguin, which is a parody of Rodin's commemorative sculpture of Balzac.)

Since I started a new job in January, I've been so busy that I've really posted about nothing but books. In this post, I thought I would catch you up on a few other things in my life.

The scrapbookening continues! I had vague visions of doing this in some sort of systematic way, but in fact I've been hopping around in time from event to event. Right now I'm on a wedding kick, having realized that wedding invitations are an excellent "scrap", as are the thank-you notes if the bride and groom happened to send them. (When you are trying to scrapbook events that happened years ago, which you were not at the time planning to scrapbook, often it's difficult to rustle up anything but photographs for the pages.)

I was similarly inspired by the idea of using birthday cards from my 30th birthday bash in my scrapbook. I'd just finished laying out ten beautiful pages when my cat Baby Boy leaped on the table. "Baby Boy!" I wailed, and Baby Boy fled to the far end of the table top, at which point the table tipped under his weight and all my beautiful pages went flying as the table fell over.

Baby Boy is alive, but he was for about ten seconds in serious danger of being made into cat stew.

I've put the 30th birthday pages back together. (Baby Boy fortunately didn't damage anything except one of the cardstock sheets, which is of course now part of my Adventures in Scrapbooking scrapbook page, with a photograph of the destruction that he wrought, with Baby Boy crouched in the background gazing dazed at the fallen table.) But I haven't had the heart to start in on the captions; hence working on weddings instead.

I've also been on a Quest for the perfect three-ring binder. After some experimentation I have concluded that the path of wisdom is a series of one-inch O-rings, as the scrapbook pages turn much more easily than in either O-ring or D-ring two-inchers.

Other things! I'm signed up for an intro to watercolor class tomorrow. As a child I really enjoyed watercolors, but it's been years since I've used them, so a class seemed like a good way to ease back in. Over the summer I acquired a book about nature journaling (a castaway from a retiring professor's office), which enchanted me, and watercolor seems like the perfect medium for a nature journal, since so much of what I find enchanting in nature is the color.

I haven't done much writing - aside from book reviews for DW, and letters, and scrapbooking... Okay, I haven't done much fiction writing this year, but I am ever so slowly dragging myself through the copy-edits on Diary of a Cranky Bookworm. My goal is to get it out in October! (Sage starts her diary in October. Maybe I should make her diary start date my deadline.)

Oh, and I've started going on an evening Cat Walk, as I call it, which consists of walking around the neighborhood to meet the local cats. Porch Cat is an orange tabby who lies reliably in the sun on his porch; Trinket is a one-eyed black cat with a white bib who sometimes prowls around my house. He likes to be petted if he's in the mood, but his two-eyed lookalike runs away whenever people approach. There is a house with a set of associated kittens, half-wild, including a cream one with dark rings round the eyes whom I call Goggles; and around the corner, a fluffy black kitten all tail and eyes named Umi.

Two weeks ago, I posted about my recent excursions in scrapbooking. Since that time, the scrapbook bug has only bitten deeper, to such an extent that I sorted through all my photos on Facebook, LJ, and Twitter for scrapbooking purposes.

In this process, I discovered:

1. The resolution on Facebook photographs is terrible, but they actually look pretty all right if you print them out at half size.

2. Actually it is nice to have some half size photos! Variety in photo size/shape adds visual interest to a page, especially if said page is built more or less entirely off photographs.

3. Jury is still out on the quality of the Twitter photos, but I am suspicious.

4. Especially because it turns out that if you scroll back through the feed on your Twitter profile, it eventually just stops! Long before it reaches your actual first tweet! I don’t know if you could reach an earlier tweet if you happened to have it bookmarked, or if they have simply been scoured from the internet.

5. Although there is clearly some record of that earlier data somewhere, as you can retrieve your earlier photos if you download your Twitter archive.

6. This was a great relief, because otherwise there was a period from July 2018 to September 2021 during which I posted exactly one photo. The Twitter downloading has cut the blank spot down to July 2018 to December 2019.

7. I am of course planning a 2018/2019 page, on black paper, entitled “A Digital Dark Age,” with my single lonely “I voted!” selfie from November 2018, plus a list of events (written in silver gel pen) which I could have scrapbooked had I ever printed the photos out. The black bear and the beaver and the hillside of blueberries in Canada! My very first Heartland Film Fest! My 2019 trip to Massachusetts…

I also have an “I voted!” sticker to go on this page. Is it the actual 2018 sticker, or an extra that I got at some other time? Who can say! Almost certainly from later, actually. However, there are times when one embraces truth of mood rather than exact literal truth while scrapbooking.

8. Speaking of digital dark ages, it’s been a bit sobering to go through these old photos and find so many broken links - some of my photos have mysteriously disappeared, Livejournals and Twitters deleted, etc. (The half-life on Twitter reviews is especially dire.) Thinking about dedicating a scrapbook page to each of my books so as to collect the reviews.

When

littlerhymes and I were reading the Boggart books, I mentioned that in my youth, the first book inspired me to write a poem called “Scottish Sword Dance.” (Had I ever seen a Scottish sword dance? No. Does The Boggart even include a description of a Scottish sword dance? Also no. You can do these things when you’re ten.)

In the process of searching for this masterpiece, I discovered (1) that I appear to have misplaced a box containing most of my childhood poetry and drawings, and (2) my old scrapbook, featuring the three-week trip that my parents and I took to Australia and New Zealand when I was a wee lass of 17.

“If only I had kept up the scrapbooking,” I sighed. “I would love to have a scrapbook of my Barcelona trip, or my study abroad in York. Alas, alas. Too late to begin anew with my more recent trips, of course. Didn’t collect sufficient ephemera to make proper scrapbooks anyway.”

I have now scrapbooked my trip to Paris with

littlerhymes. I enjoyed putting it together so much that I proceeded to scrapbook various events from 2022, including (1) Harvest Days with Christina, (2) Winterlights with my mom, and (3) ice hiking with Dad.

For the ice hiking pages, I had the brilliant idea to cut up the state park map for material. One can make a scrapbook with just photos and captions - Harvest Days and Winterlights are both like this (although I did cut out a snowflake for Winterlights), but I always think that a scrapbook is the better for having bits of ephemera from the experience itself, ticket stubs and bookmarks and business cards and so forth.

Upon a second search for “Scottish Sword Dance,” I discovered that I still possess my cache of scrapbooking material from Barcelona, plus my journal of the trip! And I still have my own photos, albeit on Facebook, which does not print out at very high quality, sadly. Perhaps if I print the photos at a smaller size…

In looking through all these photos for scrapbooking, I have discovered that I like to photograph:

1. food,
2. flowers,
3. cats,
4. doors/staircases/pathways of Mysterious Portent,
5. artwork,
6. bookcases,
7. and interesting architectural details.

What I don’t usually photograph:

1. Myself.
2. Other people I am with.

What do people most like to see in scrapbooks?

1. Photographs of people that they know.

Fortunately I have a few such photographs among the masses of food pictures! But going forward I must remember to photograph myself and my traveling companions more often.

Sadly, during my road trip last fall I purposefully (foolishly!) only bought as many postcards as I could send, and I don’t have a lot of brochures and ticket stubs and things left either. If only I hadn’t cleaned out the backseat of the car after I returned! Simply did not realize… But since that trip is still quite recent, I may be able to cobble together enough material for a scrapbook, after all.