Collecting memories

The most popular blogpost that I have done since September is by far the one showing you the results of my Summer Scrapbook, and so as I started to collect all my memories from my time in London (this blog included), I decided that it would be a fun project to document that process. I wanted this scrapbook to have a different feel to the one about summer. I feel like that scrapbook, with all it's girlyness and pastels was almost an ode to the bliss of summer which isn't really a reality. It is full of exciting trips and events and picnics but nothing about the grind of life. It was also my last summer after school and I had no idea what I was getting myself into this year or how I would mature so much, so fast. This scrapbook about my time in London intends to be slightly more documentary, a little darker in tone generally, and less frilly altogether to leave that teenager firmly behind me.

It took a lot of time to discover what kind of scrapbook I wanted. I looked on A Beautiful Mess and coveted their eco-scrapbooks, chipboard and all the rest. I used many blogs and scoured bloglovin' for people who had shared their scrapbooks for inspiration and tips on how to start. I went to an exhibition at the ICA in London which had a room with a few artists' scrapbooks in, too. For some reason, it was harder the second time around! However, it was worth it, and I have to say that this scrapbook is a lot more planned that before. One thing I didn't need to learn, however, was to hoarde the most random things. For years, I have kept all sorts of cards and letters and eventually had little use for them: this year was different! All those cards wishing me well? They have the most wonderful messages which are being pasted in next to images of London that I took in the first few months, or they will be pinned to a surface by a paperclip so that I can still keep each page looking neat and balanced. Even birthday cards from October that contained the blandest of well-wishes were useful. Some had coloured pages or prints that I could use as a mount to frame some of my photographs, some simply had amazing cover designs which I could cut up or just use as cute quotes to sit alongside some of my favourite pictures.

One thing I did learn was to plan my pages. This is something I did not do before at all, but this time I got my blu tac ready and once I had collected and sorted my initial pictures of my first few months, I started to pin down how I wanted them to be presented, and then found bits of cards, letters etc. that would fit neatly alongside them. For some reason the printing company I used but a black border around every picture which I had to cut out and then... I went a little crazy and cut some of my pictures into interesting shapes. This meant that the layout itself had to be pretty simple for some pages.

I also tried to group some photographs by theme. The page below all has blurred elements to the photographs and are some of my favourites of London. I have put a white piece of paper with the words "London is a blur to me" to give this page some cohesion, as well as it being a reflection of my feelings at the time and a homage to a blog post that I made on these photographs. I later added a bit of paper reminding me to actually write up an except from that blog post in that blank space. I am trying to create a way of tying in photographs which distinct memories and feelings and hopefully this starts the process of doing that!

I haven't planned what kind if backgrounds I want to use yet. I have some old wrapping paper from christmas (yep, I'm that kind of hoarder!) as well as some paper bags from shops that I plan to rip/ use as a mount for framing. You can see in the picture about that I found a gold patch on the back of a card and have used that to mount a photograph, too. I want to try and 'find' as much as I can: not only to save money, but to try and make this project which uses up so much paper a little bit more ethical! I have only planned the first few pages but in my break hope to do a lot more (including ordering another term's worth of photographs!)

Do you have any scrapbooking tips?

-Antonia

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!