classes: Continuing confessionals | pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

Ready to talk about photos for this weekend? I thought so.

Well, you can go two ways: you can choose your confessions to match the photos you want to use, or you can acquire photos to match the confessions you want to use. Either way, you need one photo per confession plus one photo for the cover. Let’s start there.

For the cover, you might want to use a picture of you. I did. But I used a blurry photo that I might not use elsewhere. A photo that was accidental but I still liked…you know those photos that are not going to win any prizes for being technically beautiful but you can’t delete them because there’s something there you like? A photo like that. Plus I thought it would be kinda clever if the photo was a bit blurry, like there is something to hide. Matches the confession theme, right? In fact, I used this throughout my book so actually all of my photos involve some amount of blur. Some more than others. So that photo just stuck out as a recent one that I might not use otherwise. But you could take a picture on purpose—you could play with miming telling someone a secret or making a ‘shhhh’ expression, or you could just use it as an excuse to grab a friend and have a little photo session, where the goal is to get one photo each of you like of yourselves.

Or…you might not want to be a cover girl. In that case, choose a photo that you like, a photo that fits the theme…pose an artful shot of a diary for example. Or use a photo that you just plain think would look cool on a book cover. That is always allowed.

For the inside, you need one photo for each confession. I have five confessions so I have five photos. You can have any number of confessions you like—I have five because it is enough to make it a book but not so many that I would be working on it for days. I wanted a project I could put together off and on over an afternoon and have it completed. So five was right for me—choose the number right for you.

Starting with an idea for your confessions will probably be easiest…think of one little quirk you’d like to share and then a photo that goes with it. You might already have that photo—I used a photo from a trip we took last year for a confession about looking forward to a trip this year—or you might need to take that photo—I snapped one shot in our living room to match one idea I wanted to include. If you’re really stuck, you can even search Flickr as some photographers release the copyright on their photos and allow you to include them in your own projects (the copyright info on a flickr page is in the right hand column of fine print).

Once you’ve figured out an idea for one confession (you don’t need the wording to be perfect just yet) and photo pairing, hopefully the process will get easier. Think of a conversation with girlfriends – real or imaginary – about silly, innocent things that you do differently than everyone else. Things you would like to tell someone but you’re not sure how well they’d take it. I’ll share all my confessions on Friday, but in the mean time here are a few from anonymous others to get you thinking…
Do you hate it when people wear shoes without socks?
Do you stack your toast so the buttered sides touch?
Do you actually quite like ironing?
Could you live quite happily without a telephone (or any other modern invention)?
Do you have a chocolate stash for times of emergency?
Do you cling to something you have kept since you were a baby?
Is there one song or CD you put on repeat when no one is around (or one you would really rather never hear again)?
It’s okay if your confessions are in the ‘something about…’ stage right now. That’s enough to get a photo. Like ‘something about how I hate answering machines’ is fine right now. The wording can come later.

You can use colour or black and white photographs. I actually used half of each.

Remember that the pages of your book will be made from the photos themselves, so you may want to print at a size different than your usual habit. My pages are 5×7, but a 4×6 book works too or you could make a giant project at 8×10 if you really wanted lots of room to write and embellish. You just need one print of each photo, including the cover.

If there’s anything I haven’t thought to cover and you have a question, please post it in the comments and I’ll edit this post to include it. Otherwise, everything else will be posted here on Friday afternoon, British time, just in time for the weekend!

xlovesx

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17 January 2007

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