Scrapbooking Summer

While uploading pictures on facebook, twitter or instagram is a great way to share photographs and memories, I never feel like they satisfy or give such special memories the attention they deserve. Sure, for the half an hour you flick through this album (and the hours that follow while the people in the photos comment on them) the memories are kept alive, celebrated, and sometimes mocked. But until a few years later when someone decides to rustle up an awful image of you looking windswept with a grimace on your face, it is rare that you look upon these memories with the same fondness. It's onto the next album, and the next, and the next... and all these precious times become dust as the present excitement ensues.

This summer was hugely special to me: I finished school, had my first holiday alone with a friend (where else but Disneyland?), volunteered for four weeks of it, and generally tasted independence in a way which I hadn't before. I celebrated the end of this routine that I had inhabited for the last 7 years with friends in the form of a ball (fancy gowns and aching feet included), went to Wimbledon for the first time, met up with the CU to pray for the year ahead, and watched a youth leader I love get married. It was a pretty exciting time because I knew that the future was just ahead of me and all my friends, and I had no idea what was coming next. At the same time I was trying to do all I could with my time as well as spending time with my family before making the move to London, and making the most of time spent without the pressures of work or study. It felt wrong to document these things on facebook albums that will only hide away, and not to give these memories the attention they deserve.

So for the first time, I gave scrapbooking a go. And after spending hours in my free time on weekends making it, I have (in mid-November) completed it. Not only has it been fulfilling my inner crafty side that has been itching to come out since I dropped Art after AS Levels, but it gave me an opportunity to reflect on the opportunities I had, the friends I made, the laughs I had forgotten about in the blur of my new life in London. It made me smile on the Saturdays when I was feeling tired and, while my housemates were out with friends, pretty lonesome.

Here are some pictures! (and by some I mean pretty much most of the book, but with a few left out - I still wish to surprise my friends when I see them at Christmas..)

One of my favourite things about scrapbooking was getting to use up all the leaflets and pamphlets from Wimbledon and Disneyland in order to make backgrounds and decorate the pages without them wasting away in a box somewhere, or on a pinboard where they are bound to rip and get all dog-eared!

I took my disposable camera with me to Disneyland, and while not many of the photographs were useable (getting tourists to take photos on something so outdated is not the most reliable thing!), I love the way that this photograph turned out, with all the random colour filters contrasting with the grey sky. It pretty much emulates our over-excited mood of the magic of Disney in spite of the weather!

I edited these photographs before having them printed - I just love how this page is like a little momento to the old photographs taken of Disneyland before there was colour photo, and is a particular highlight of the book for me. I like having the courtesy photographs against the old-style 'shoppe' background and the man with the tophat, as well as the old car against the palace. 

The light show was so spectacular that I had to restrain myself from putting all the photos in the book - in the end only three made it and had individual pages so they could be shown off to their fullest, reflecting the fact that the light show was a real highlight of my whole summer (these captions are starting to get a little GCSE Art-like, aren't they?)

After the neat and prim nature of the Disney pages, UBM comes with 3 pictures on each page, all cut up and jagged and hidden by fancy cutting of the paper. It really was that hectic while I was there, I thought I would never recover from such exhaustion!

There are probably many different arty things I could say about this - how I used specific colours for the pages to reflect the photographs (the Wimbledon pages were all green and lilac, the Disney ones mainly pink!) or how I tried to match the mood or the nature of the event to the way I decorated, or the way I moved chronologically through the summer, or how I tried not to use the same patterns in two chronological pages so that each page was unique - but it would be pretty tiresome and take away from the fact that I made this to be kept, laughed at and loved for years to come. I even left pages to add more photographs to if I fancied!

Hope you have enjoyed this post - 'tis a little different to my normal rant-about-London style but I find that it's always nice to live vicariously through other peoples' memories.

-Antonia

P.S. All these photographs were taken on my HTC One. Not sure how the quality translates!