pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

Photo by Boopsie Daisy

Some days I am not sure which I like more: paper or pens. I started being very particular about pens circa age 12, when I was high into my note-passing-in-class phase. I had discovered the difference between the Bic fine point and the standard medium point and how the fine point turned my handwriting from clumsy and chunky into loopy and feminine. I wasn’t going to touch a medium point pen again if could help it. Even if they didn’t make the fine point in pink or purple, and let me tell you, that was a big sacrifice.

As I could find finer and finer pointed pens, I got happier and happier. A roommate at college had fine point gellyroll pens in every colour under the sun, and I think that could have been the biggest reason to housesit for her one summer. The flat was teeny-tiny, the oven didn’t turn on and the drain clogged like seventy-two times a day, but I could sit next to a sunny window with approximately one-hundred-and-sixty-three shades of fine point pen and doodle and write to my heart’s content.

I could only write in my teacher planner with the 0.4 pens from Paperchase, and I colour coded my grading sheets with the 0.5 because they came in the much better colour scheme of aqua, pink and purple.

And all my scrapbook pages are finished with this pen, which I buy by the box and have in a dedicated drawer that is exactly the height of my right hand as I stand at my table.

Click for print-sized card.

Of course right now, I am working on things involving fountain pens, with extra schwoops and curls. With ink in a pot. It’s all rather lovely.

xlovesx

Comment [4]

Photo by Arlsan.

This is part two…so make sure you have the card from the 15th before you try today’s exercise.

Click for print-sized card.

xlovesx

Comment [2]

Photo by Mosippy

When I was ten, I had the most amazingly creative and memorable teacher in the history of the world who had us do projects that probably made parents roll their eyes and wonder what exactly we were supposed to learn from things like dressing a pinecone as a small person and carrying it in our pocket for a week. They probably rolled their eyes more when they came to school for parent-teacher conferences and saw that she balked at rigid classroom order in favour of letting us all have pillows on our chairs and our own box of kleenex on our desks. But clearly she knew that pillows and kleenex would keep us in our seats and focused on our work just as she knew that carrying a pinecone could teach us about both responsibility and perspective.

To this day, she is one of my most favourite people in the whole wide world.

Click for print-sized card.

xlovesx

Comment [5]

Photo restored and uploaded by Patrick Q

This is something that came to me out of force (it’s a required text for a syllabus I taught for several years) and yet it will probably always stay with me. As a student, I couldn’t stand set texts. I hated them on principle. As a result, I ruined several books for myself when I didn’t need to. Some of them I rediscovered later on my own terms; some burned me out so much I refused to teach them in my own classroom. And when I started having to teach things on a set list, I was convinced I would grow to hate all of them too, so things like Before you were mine were a sign that clearly I had matured in some way or another. {Of course, some of my students would tell you I had just become more boring, but I am settling with mature. If cataclysmic is my favourite word in the English language, boring is certainly my least favourite.}

With teenagers, there’s this tricky few weeks where you have to get it into their heads that poetry is not all Dr Seuss. (Don’t get me wrong, Dr Seuss is lovely. Really lovely. But there is also more.) They start being convinced that poetry must rhyme. That rhyme is more important than meaning. So much so that it’s almost like they are on one side of the classroom with picket posters that shout ‘RHYME!’ while the teachers are in the corner with smaller signs that ask politely ‘But what about meaning?’ and eventually it all gets ironed out. We hope. (Then of course we go and confuse things with poets who can do both rhyme and meaning and well, they are just too good.) So in nearly every lesson I have observed of teachers fighting this little battle, the teacher uses a quotation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that poetry is “the best words in the best order”. (Please, my former students who are sitting your exams this year: know who said that if you are going to quote it. He is pretty important and his life is pretty interesting anyway, so just read about him here and never, ever say ‘A famous man once said…’ on an exam paper. Thanks.)

(Can I say much more in brackets today? Sheesh.)

Anyway, the best words thing sometimes makes me cringe, but in the case of this poem I quite like it. I am not very good at drawing on the white board but it never stopped me, so I would doodle some lady in a skirt with a big smile and curly blonde hair and ask students for words to describe her personality, so that inevitably someone would contribute ‘bubbly’. So let’s take bubbly. What can bubbly mean? And after we get through the description of personality, we would get to bubbles and champagne and all those other things until we got to soda. How would you describe soda? Here, we call it a fizzy drink. So then we would stop right there and read the poem for the first time. And question number one would be ‘Why call her fizzy and not bubbly?’

Moments like that are why I love teaching English.

And off we would go from there.

Click for print-sized card.

If you want to add a Valentine’s theme to this, you could always write about a couple rather than a person. Your choice.

(More in brackets: a lot of people keep asking me why I am still into teaching English if I’m not doing it right now. If you haven’t figured it out, teaching English isn’t something I have left forever. I don’t think I ever could. I needed to change gears before I burned out the engine, and once that car has had some fine-tuning, this will all be relevant once again. She’s just in the garage for a nice break. Ha! Metaphor!)

(Sadly, English teacher humour doesn’t get much better than that.)

xlovesx

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Photo from Living Etc via Hidden in France

I suppose it’s no secret that I find inspiration in cooking. I think it’s because there are so many layers that I find magical: beautiful kitchens and the designs of furniture, appliances and containers, the artful still life of food before we eat, the mix of art and science that creates recipes that are handed down on syrup-stained index cards with hand-scrawled ink, the way ingredients can be versatile and shift from sweet to savoury, mild to spicy, and that whole will-it-rise/will-it-not thing keeps me on pins and needles when I am cooking. So for all the books, magazines and websites who say it’s boring to talk about what you had for lunch on your website, I quietly disagree.

So today, let’s write about food, okay?

xlovesx

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photo by littlehonda

Carousels make me so happy I almost cry when I see them. I really can’t explain. They are both garish and beautiful all at once.

The last time I visited this pier, the rides at the end were being renovated, including the carousel. The shell was there but the horses were gone. It made me think the sky would fall or something. There was just something very wrong about the a carousel without a single spot to ride.

There should have been horses.

This one isn’t easy. But I wouldn’t have been happy with myself if I left it out. I think if you’re going to go to the trouble to try to improve your written voice, you need to write in more than one mood. And to realise that the mood in which you write needn’t set the tone for your day.

I hope yours is lovely and all that it should be.

xlovesx

Comment [27]

Photo by Majamom

Since just before moving, we have been battling with the concept known as minimalism.

We are not good at it.

Correction: I am not good at it.

Despite freecycling and donating enough clothes to fill several wardrobes, I still have what can only be termed as a lot of clothes. I am also rather fond of shoes. And yarn. And paper.

And books.

I think The Boy is coming to realise that the rest of the stuff is going to be a long war for me. I like repurposing and moving things around a little too much to just get rid of it all. I am taking baby steps and I have to get a little credit for that. But the books stump us both.

Our combined library entails books from four university reading lists in four different subjects (maths, computer science, literature and gender studies…plus some music theory for good measure), enough cook books to make sure we never really have to invent a meal ever for the rest of our lives, more craft projects than we could ever complete, a fair chunk of novels for both grown-ups and secondary school children and pretty much every book written on teaching English in the secondary school in the last twenty years. We also realise that technology is on the brink of us being able to scan all of these books into a computer and do the book equivalent of turning all our CDs into MP3s, releasing oodles of space and making one giant leap toward minimalism.

But I will have you know that we haven’t gotten rid of our CDs, despite having our entire music library in digital format. And I really like turning pages, so I can’t say that I will be first in line to scan them all then release them to the recycling.

Especially the old books. They are too precious. I love how the pages cling to one another for dear life and how the spines develop perfect creases, and how different pressings take the same book and make it look so different that I am compelled to read it again, just to see if the ending is the same.

Because truly, if I own six different editions of Through the Looking Glass, I am incapable of ever being a minimalist.

Click for print-sized card.

I do find hearing the favourite books of others to be so inspiring, for I shall never be without a non-minimal reading list. Do share yours, pretty please.

xlovesx

Comment [9]

Photo from Christina Lutze

{And now my plan is to abandon my own pictures entirely, for just a few days. Hurrah for Flickr and its favourites system. Genius.}

According to many experts and also me, there are two things at which we all excel in England. Queuing and talking about the weather. I’ve already mentioned the former enough to cause some confusion (standing in a line…that’s what it means. And we do it even if we don’t know what the line is for. We just gravitate toward it and bing! There we are in orderly fashion. And don’t get me started on queue-jumpers.) and this guy is on to so many levels of the London queue. So let’s talk about the weather.

When I first arrived in England, people apologised for the weather. I arrived in the middle of the summer but it was still grey and cold enough to need a jacket. (If you ever travel here, you will find no need to delve into your jetlagged brain for real conversation. The first twenty-four hours of conversation will easily be filled with ‘How was your flight?’ and ‘Sorry about the weather’. You’ll be fine.) Within a few days, the conversation had shifted to ‘What’s the weather like where you’re from?’ and at the time I didn’t think there was anything particularly noteworthy about the weather back home, except for the legendary tornado. Having been here a while, now I answer that same question with ‘extreme’. The winters there are cold. Really cold. With ice. The summers are hot. Really hot. So hot there are days you can’t face going outside at all. And then there’s the wind. Lots and lots of wind. Since that’s what happens when there isn’t a hill or a tree in sight to break the breeze. So yep, pretty extreme.

Here we have the mild. Winter feels cold but in this part of the country it rarely freezes and we haven’t seen so much as a flake of snow this year. Last summer lasted approximately 3.4 days. And in between we have chilly and not chilly, grey and not grey. Rainy and not rainy.

But I think that’s perfect.

I do find I yearn for the change of seasons more now, but I don’t know if that’s due to the location or the growing-up factor. Right now it is totally due to being so close to a park that I adore and wanting it to be just warm enough that I can sit there and work for hours without it being too cold or too busy. Soon.

So yes, clearly this is something we do with ease here: talking about the weather. I’ll try to stifle myself now and give you today’s card:

click for print-sized card.

Of course, there is much to be said for morning window photos to be left alone, like the beauty of this. But part of me knows that my British side would love to write a story narrating all those photos, despite never knowing either of the two photographers. But perhaps that is a little much for one exercise.

xlovesx

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