Time is fleeting
Somewhere in the brown phase.
Oddly enough, it has taken me far more time to compile this last section of the time warp—it turns out that the earlier years are easier to summarise, where there were fewer changes, but each more noteworthy, while the last five years have been full of lots of small steps adding up. And yet to me it seems like there has been very little change in the last few years. Perspective is a funny thing. Suffice to say: this is a long post. I had originally had the Q&A at the end of this but there is no way anyone would read for that long, so it is relegated to tomorrow, along with the little project I wanted to share that brought all of this about in the first place.
I took a break at the beginning of 2003, though I didn’t quite notice it at the time. I was busy with a promotion at work and wasn’t scrapping for publication. One notable exception was a last-minute call to teach at a big event in the UK where I filled in for an American teacher who wasn’t able to fly over. I had just a few days to look at the class kit and the teacher’s powerpoint slides and try to make sense of it all, but it seemed okay in the end. Teaching someone else’s class is an immense challenge…it felt like learning a new language to me: a challenge with a great reward, but nothing makes sense for a very long time!
More…brown.
What I was doing in my little retreat from my scrapbooking supplies was hanging out with my art journal. I have kept art journals off and on since the age of fourteen but I never show them to anyone. For me, scrapbooks are there for public consumption (even if that just means future generations or guests in our house) but journals are not. I don’t keep the majority of them. For me, they are a place to work out thoughts and ideas and masterplans. When I am in a journal phase, I will write and write and write and while I am drawing or painting in the same book, I am thinking over what I have written. I think writing in a journal is one of those things that is linked to your personality type—it has to do with introspection and the way you think. In teaching students to write, I was always quietly shocked by those who didn’t hear the words in their head when they read, wrote or thought. I would normally ask if they thought in pictures or colours—sometimes yes, sometimes no. I think in words and pictures. Constantly. Words a bit more, because I can think in words more quickly than I can put the pictures together. But the students who thought in neither…they were a cause for concern for me. I can’t imagine how that would work. So anyway, my years of spirit-levelled graphic design scrapbook pages were pretty much over as I wrote and drew in loopy-de-loops and ink droplets in my journal. Of course, I didn’t really know the two were linked at the time.
Are we seeing a trend here?
Halfway through 2003, there was cause for excitement. After a few false starts from various places, there was a real plan for a UK-based scrapbooking magazine. I started working on the project as the ‘artistic designer’, which made me sound like an art editor but I really didn’t have any part in that stage of the production. Of course, when you join a team working on the early stages of a project like that, you have blinkers and don’t see everything else going on around you, and in the time that we were in production stages, other UK magazines were in production too. And having only worked on magazines that already existed and had regular publishing routines, I never realised how long it would take from the initial offer to join the team until we saw the first issue. A million things would happen in life between the two.
Let’s see…what colour goes with red? Oh, I know! Brown!
Over the course of 2003…
I stopped buying supplies and made do with what I had amassed, as I left the world of the Local Scrapbooking Store.
I went from the cupboard under the stairs to my own flat, complete with a second bedroom dedicated entirely to artsy-craftsy things. Strapped for cash after paying the security deposit, I only bought the furniture one needs. So out with the idea of a television and a sofa; in with an adjustable drafting table and shallow drawer unit for supplies. Obviously.
The influences of art journals and the magazine meant I was working more on single page layouts and small themed albums—which today I am sure we would just call minibooks.
Every.single.thing.I.made used dark earth tones. You can spot one of these layouts in my album in a second from all the brown and dark green and brown ink and even sand glued on the pages. And a fair bit of acrylic paint, but even that is in earth tones. There is no happy colour for the entire year and part of the next.
I worked on far too many circle journals than could keep one person sane. Most were organised groups, but there was also a database on a website I joined at this point where you could list your address and people would send you a journal to work in, with no warning. Most of them were quite fun, but some were very dark, so I eventually left the project.
Ladies and Gentlemen! Brown has left the building!
One very, very important part of my scrapbooking style came from that move and the choice of what to buy when I needed to furnish an empty apartment from scratch. I didn’t buy a printer. So I had to handwrite my journalling on layouts. I had no other option. Once I let go of the stress of messing up a page and stopped pencilling in all my writing to trace over it with a pen…and once I found smaller tipped pens to write with…everything clicked into place. Suddenly the writing on my layouts was my actual day-to-day writing, not some stilted print where I tried to make it perfect yet it inevitably looked wrong. Never again would I spend ages typing in my text and measuring the space on the layout and printing a draft and holding it up to the light to see if it will fit and changing the font and the margins and everything else. From then on, I would just pick up the pen and write until I ran out of room. This is the moment that I took stress out of scrapbooking for me. For my pages, the pen is mightier than the printer, indeed.
Well, almost. It took some time (and some vintage paper) to finally shake the earth tones from my system.
While still working on the magazine, which was alternately slow-going then very fast paced, I did something that felt totally unexpected that spring and took up a challenge from an art group to make one piece of art every day for a month (that may have been the easy part) and sell it on ebay (the hard part!). That was a collage series called Guide Words, with each piece created on top of a page from a discarded school dictionary. The first few that I listed had me worried, as they sat there with no bids until someone would pay for them right at the last minute…but by day four, there was promise. All thirty pieces sold. The winning bids varied from piece to piece—from $10 to $100. I had never really shared non-scrapbook art work before, so this was a huge step for me. They sold to a variety of people—some I knew, some I didn’t—and three were sold to galleries. I didn’t know what to do with myself, this was so amazing to me.
Also, should I mention that I had met The Boy one month before I started Guide Words? So although I still didn’t own a sofa, life was still pretty good.
More good: Guide Words became my first online class. Fifteen of us collaged together and shared our work step-by-step, with participants in the US, Canada and the UK. Fourteen ladies and one man. All the prompts back then were plain text emails, sometimes with a picture attached to the message, but mostly it was about reading the instructions and interpreting them in your own way. We all made one collage together during a live chat, which was hilarious. You could just imagine getting paint on your keyboard and I don’t think a single one of us owned a webcam.
Colour and grunge start to collide.
Joanna Campbell-Slan asked me to help judge the first ever Best of British competition, along with Mary Anne and Bev of UKScrappers. Opening each envelope was great fun and we discovered some talented scrappers who came to be great friends. It felt like the UK industry was starting to become real, as if it had just been a velveteen rabbit in the past. Mary Anne and I also worked on a book for beginners that summer.
Scrapbooking Memories & More finally debuted in the summer of 2004, and we spent a fair amount of time out and about promoting it while we were also working on the next issue. I had my own column, Finding your Voice, that featured pages and projects but always with a journalling angle. Interestingly, when I googled to find the press releases about the debut issue, there was a survey on the CHA website asking if scrapbooking was past its peak and going to crash from there on out. In 2004. Interesting because the same questions are being thrown out today in 2008, only with the words ‘due to the recession’ tagged on at the end. I find it interesting that some of the biggest voices in the industry thought 2004 could be the dying days. The industry changed then. It’s changing now. Change doesn’t mean the end. Anyway, we had three issues in 2004—summer, autumn and the Christmas issue. It wasn’t perfect, but we believed in what each of us was making and writing and the emails we got from readers made us think we were doing the right thing, even though it was taking a great deal of time without knowing where it would go.
December 2004 was the very first year I ran Journal your Christmas online. We had about sixty participants that first year, and all the prompts were plain text. It was a project where I could see more and more that I could do as each day went on, so I hoped I could build it a bit more the next year. Who knew?
In 2004…
Just two big changes. All handwritten journaling.
And at the very end of 2004, I finally went digital. The Boy bought me a Canon 300D for Christmas and I pretty much fainted in delight. I had been bad-mouthing digital for four years, refusing to go from film SLR to point-and-shoot digital, and not being able to afford a DSLR. So oh goodness, crazy amounts of photos, here I come.
Now, layouts in colour. A turning point!
The next year started with confusion: I went to the CHA trade show in Atlanta for the very first time, partly for the Best of British book launch, partly to report for the magazine. But came home to find the magazine had closed abruptly, which was a smack in the face. But good things followed: Guide Words was published as a book. Several of us went on to join Scrapbook Inspirations, published every four weeks with real deadlines and real art editors. My first layout with SI is this floral one in issue three—August 2005.
Online classes became my pride and joy, and they weren’t always scrapbook based. That year we did a lot of mail art and minibooks. The girls at the post office started to learn that when an oddly shaped item arrived with stamps stuck to it, it was probably for me. But we were still in plain text email stage at this point. It wasn’t until Christmas 2005 that I upgraded to PDF files.
I flew to the states to teach at two Creating Keepsakes conventions. I learned so much I could never write it all down.
And most importantly, I learned to embrace colours that were not avocado green and java brown. Shocking.
From then to now…
I continue to work with Scrapbook Inspirations.
I’ve grown my online classes to include guest artists and numbers of participants I never would have thought possible, while staying the one-girl-indie-business.
I went to CKU again. For fun. It was lovely.
I upgraded my camera. And seriously upgraded my lifeplan, which had previously read more along the lines of ‘live alone for all eternity’.
After an entire year of battling with the idea in my head of what I was really supposed to be doing with my life, I resigned from my teaching position to scrapbook full time. Thankfully the leap of faith worked and more good things came along: lots of teaching opportunities; meeting amazing people in my classes that have taught me so much; seeing places I’ve never been. All of which will make me a better school teacher when I eventually go back to that role. And designing my own range of product for Banana Frog? Very, very cool.
From 2005, yet still very true.
I am still all about real colour, still about handwritten journalling, still about telling my own story.
And still very much loving the entire idea of scrapbooking. I am very grateful for those paper dolls and viking opera singers and plastic shape templates of yore, for without them, my life would be entirely different.
I promise that is the end of the schmaltz. I can’t help it: from where I sit today, it’s true.
xlovesx
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