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

i have a real love for quality advertising. not all advertising by any means, as i am reminded whenever i visit a place with a television or i leaf through any martha stewart publication, trying to separate content from adverts for cling film. but advertisements you remember for ages, or that give you some sort of inner peace. the boy and i were talking about this last night…how proportionately, there are so few good adverts, and how that makes the good ones even better. i still can’t look away from the honda cog. i think of the vw golf every time i see a chair put out with the rubbish. and some days, i really would like to buy the world a coke and keep it company.

{actually, during the last school year i got to sit in on a seminar led by the team that create the honda ads—the cog, as well as ‘what if?’ and ‘hate something, change something’. they shared their process, going from a grumpy engineer and a music video to their animated advert, and so on. these people are just fascinating. it’s no wonder they make good stuff. i try to think of the mix up of their team whenever i am in one of those ‘if you want something done, do it yourself’ moods. which is too often, i must admit.}

anyway, i’ve been keeping an ad related thing a secret and today i found out i don’t have to keep schtum anymore, so i’m not. fiskars make things that cut. lots of things that cut lots of other things in lots of shapes and sizes. obvious things like scissors and paper trimmers, but also the not obvious things like paper drills, garden gadgets and things that make primary school teachers smile all day long. {i’m thinking maybe we should bring back a bit of old fashioned cut and paste to secondary school though. especially in administrative meetings.} last year fiskars started this print&web campaign, wherein crafters of the paper and fabric varieties along with gardeners shared their views on creativity with others via a journal. some individual pages made it to the big time to become glossy print ads. but you can see a gallery of these journals here.

so if my excited and gushy praise of thought-provoking advertising hasn’t made this completely obvious, i filled in this over the summer:

they pick some people (and i have no idea how) and if you say yes, they send you a blank book and some questions to prompt your responses. some i knew the answers to straight away. some took ages to think of anything that would work. the page i like the most looks like something out of a comic. well, a comic that’s in pink and black and has no people. but i’ll post more later in the year, when it appears on the fiskars site. yay.

in other news…there are new things afoot for the website. classes are just the start. i’ve been working SO HARD this week! fabulous. and very pink, i must say.

xlovesx

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greetings from the garden state. internet access is easier and cheaper (not to mention working) in newark airport. not so much for my hotel room in atlanta, but hey…that’s how it goes.

{this is the first flight in ages where i have had a layover that meant i could do something other than run from one gate to the next. i just ate lunch at the garden state diner, where the waitress said no one my age knows what an ice cream soda is – their loss – and they had a suitable in-diner soundtrack, except for this really random playing of ace of base in the middle. so yeah…exploring airports. and listen up youngsters: ice cream sodas = yum. just had to clear that up.}

that’s proof that i actually did some scrapbooking on this trip. in ali’s awesome album track. and you know something is good if i pull out words like…awesome. i must be jetlagged already. those are my tablemates, pj, kelly & meredith. we ate cupcakes and carrot sticks and drank twenty-seven minute wait coffee and talked and scrapped. there will be more proof later.

and that would be just one of the obligatory scrapceleb photos. but seriously. she’s a gem. totally.

now i’m gonna get on a plane on monday, wake up in england on tuesday and fly to iceland on wednesday. there is no way to get me off this high, i tell you.

{there is the fact that i need to drive a manual car in iceland. this will be an adventure in itself.}

more later.

xlovesx

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i was working on anne’s ‘self-portrait’ journal when we spent an art-girl weekend at sherwood forest. this was just past my just started phase—when i’ve got the main stuff where i want it and take the time to figure out what details i want elsewhere. except anne was THERE. and she loved it just like THIS. so to me, it’s still unfinished…but maybe that’s quite appropriate for a self-portrait?

interestingly, this is much more like my style of years ago, when i was in love with white space, except what isn’t white isn’t quite so minimal as it was then. never know what this is going to cause.

photos by tami – december 2004. if you live in that lovely suburban mecca that is kansas city, you should have your pictures taken. she’s amazing, she is.

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sally’s rules: you can not include mushy fall-in-love-get-married-have-children stuff, but list five things you want to do before you die. which is just as well by my terms. sally and i have a subtle icelandic joke thing going due to her recent trip, hence the top one. the back of each tag explains why and how. and bygoshbygolly: I DID NOT USE EARTH TONES. go me.

seriously, you have no idea how hard that is for me. shim + colour = MESS.

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i don’t know about some of these journal girls. they’ve already got you sending off pages in your diary for them to read and then they go and set a topic like this—ten things you never knew about me. well, pssh. everyone else in this book seemed to have kept some nice, normal things secret previously. i obviously talk too much because there is no way i could get away with saying how many siblings i have or where i was born. no. i had to come up with the goods.
but ha, you can’t see it. cuz it’s all hidden behind those tags. they all open like this:

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anie’s constructed a swatch ring of envelopes, each with a cd inside. each of us has to pick a colour so that the completed ring will hold all the colours in the rainbow and then some. i went with black for a few reason: because i was in love with my new can of matte-finish black spray paint, because i thought no one else would, because it is half of my favourite colour (redandblack) and because i’d just heard ‘paint it black’ about three minutes before i opened the parcel and it just seemed appropriate.

one note on altering cds: i don’t think i will ever take the cover-in-paper route. i just don’t think that’s playing fair. you’re supposed to alter the cd itself. putting paper over the top means you’re just working in a circle, not with the unique surface at all. i am a big fan of the embossing enamel approach and now i’ve added spray paint to that. anything but paper, really. that’s just cheating.

ok, off cd-altering-soapbox now.

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and we enter a new era of photos…the ones where i actually like how things look just sitting naturally on the table. hmm. we’ll see how long this trend lasts, eh?

i found cheryl’s circular journal so difficult that i took it out several times before i finally brought myself to commit an idea to paper. i tried to go with an overall feeling, then break it down into the senses rather than building up the other way around, if that makes any sense at all. it very well may not. material wise: new textured cardstock that i’m in love with, half a bouquet of house of fraser silk flowers, obvious corporate literature, denim and hot pink safety pins. it’s far more legible in real life than it is here.

for the record? i don’t like round. apparently, i really am a square (or a rectangle) after all.

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cherry wanted recipes.

i do not cook.

i did, however, find the recipe for my favourite and most habitual dish: moyashi soba @ wagamama. thanks to the covent garden wagamama for the giant supply of menus and postcards to use at my disposal. love you.

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