From Here to There

September's theme on The Documented Life Project 2015 will be Journalling with Photos. This week's art challenge is: photo transfer and our journalling prompt: From here to there. I haven't stuck to it very exactly but went off on a tangent. The background is a mixture of acrylic paints and stencils (using a stencil from Stencilgirl Club August 2015 as well as their Curvy Stems stencil). To that, pieces of a flowery paper napkin were added and then I added tape transfers of flower images out of a vintage book about nature.

The focal point is a Polaroid picture taken with a digital Polaroid camera which really I should use more often. For the journalling prompt I thought about words I had just been reading in Tara Brach's book True Refuge: finding peace and freedom in your own awakened heart (see also sidebar). The adjusted quotation reads:
"It is not about getting from here to there. It is about bringing a full presence to here, to the life of this moment". 

 And I must say I was definitely present in the moment during the past few days, dealing with a utility company, in this case Scottish Power. After the huge power cut on Sunday I went through my complaints log and discovered that we had our power interrupted 14 times last year, and 4 times this year. All this after our line was "upgraded". During that upgrade new poles were installed, two of which have now gone up in flames. Quite an explosive upgrade that was!  I pointed out to their "Customer Services" that the laws of cause and effect alone proved that something had clearly gone wrong somewhere along the line!  Sadly you can win every single battle with such companies but you will never win the war. We must now await our next outage as the pole that exploded Sunday will have to be completely renewed. Oh joys.

There were times on Sunday that I wished I wasn't present at all, at least not here. But on the plus side I did get to make this page entirely uninterrupted by phone, e-mail or any other means of communication and making it didn't require any electrical equipment. I used a Dymo writer (with batteries!) for the text.

And I'm not sure if it is connected  (so sorry about all those puns) but we also lost our broadband (through the phone) for most of yesterday As a result I have been rather absent from my online existence. This is not necessarily a bad thing (I'm trying to convince myself of this) but I do feel guilty about my lack of response on various online forums. Hopefully we are now over the worst!

If you can't beat them, join them

As some of you may have heard Blipfoto is now partnered with Polaroid. I have no problem with that. Blipfoto was operating at the top of it's capacity and urgently needed to be moved to new and larger servers. Which in turn meant they needed an infusion of money. What I do have a problem with is the utter lack of communication. If you do a Question and Answer session on the site, like the previous owner Joe Tree did last night, you don't just respond to those questions you want to answer while ignoring the ones you don't want to. Better not to do it at all and simply issue a statement of what you want to get across. This way he merely aggravated the anger that is bubbling to the surface all over the site. I'm hanging on in there at the moment (and in fact am a life member) but they're making it very difficult.

As we are now all part of Polaroid as well as Blipfoto I searched out my digital Polaroid camera  (Z340) and took a picture of our recovering patient, the greyhound Troi. She is doing a lot better and although she needs to put on the frightening amount of weight that she lost, she is definitely on the mend. Still eating human mince though and chicken, that will have to come to an end sometime soon!

I have used the camera to put on one of the Polaroid borders that it offers and needless to say this is my Blip for today.

Shine

The Documented Life Project 2014 has posted the last prompt of the year for week 52. It was: Document your family holiday tradition. Which started me off thinking how long it takes before something becomes a tradition. In the meantime however I took a picture of our Christmas tree using my polaroid camera and printed it out with one of the inbuilt borders, that gave it a sort of vintage effect. I grabbed my pile of gelli plate printed papers and by great good fortune found one that had the word SHINE prominently displayed and even better it fitted within the size requirements of the Moleskine planner I have been using this year (4.3/4 x 8"). The word come from a stencil from Stencilgirlproducts designed by Carolyn Dube

I stitched on the polaroid photograph and then punched a star out of gold card and stitched that on too so that the word SHINE could still be seen.

So here it is. Week 52 finished. The Documented Life Project 2015 starts on the 1st January 2015 and is housed on a different website although there will still be a Facebook page too. I have (finally!) decided to carry on in a planner and still tip in my pages as I did this year. I'll share my planner with you very soon. I made the decision as I'm so in love with my big, fat planner for 2014 and I will put up pictures of that too in the next few days. During this last week the Moleskine has finally shown signs that it has reached it's very maximum capacity but with the help of some washi tape I've restored it enough to use for this final week of 2014.

You can find all my posts this year about the project under the label The Documented Life. Next year's pages will appear labelled DLP2015.

Star Book

I have had several projects on my desk which I finished quite some time ago but that I haven't blogged about yet and this star book is one example. It's one of Kiala Givehand's free videos on YouTube in a monthly series on book making. This was her June book. I didn't make her May book as it involved a book binding machine and I don't have one (although I'm thinking about it!). Kiala made this star book without content using gelli plate printed pages but I wanted to add text so instead I used coloured craft paper. Above is the front cover.

This is what the book looks like from the top and it explains why it's called a star book. I haven't added a closure and when folded the book is flat.

However when it is open it acquires the star shape and as a consequence is difficult to photograph. Above and below are some of the pages. I have used printed versions of my own photographs inside (printed by Printagram from my Instagram pictures) and on the front and back cover used two of my Polaroid pictures.
I also wrote a poem for this book using sentences from a vintage book. Here is the full text spread out over the pages:

For what then was I born?

The day-dream of deep thought

Shall all things else be in mystery.

The vision was sealed upon my soul

How small the glimpse of knowledge.

I saw, and asked not its name.

Reflection is a flower of the mind.

The glance of recollection.

As you can tell below on the back cover, I finished this book back in August and I love the shape although next time I would make a separate cover to go with it and a means of closing the pages.

I won't bore you with the power upsets we had during the night. Poor John was still awake and dressed well past midnight (2 am in fact) to accommodate 2 Scottish Power engineers who fixed a loose connection on the electricity pole replaced back in July. Ever since then our lights have been flickering but despite reporting it to inspectors nothing had happened. Last night the flickering became non stop and we called out an emergency engineer who discovered that a fault had been made installing the connections and had we not called them out last night the entire pole would probably have gone up in flames. Between the pole being erected and last night we have had engineers looking at it three times and all were told about the flickering! None took any action. Glad to know we are in safe hands with Scottish Power!!!

At least that has now been fixed and we're left with our ongoing telephone saga. Is it really possible to call out a British Telecom engineer and end up with a worse line than before. Yes, it is! More engineers will be arriving to work on the line tomorrow. Fortunately I will be doing lots of fun stuff with our visitor and will leave John in charge which I have to say is lucky for the engineers in question. I'm a much harder task master than he is. And far less polite!

And they talk about an idyllic life in the country.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Gratitude Page

The task this week for The Documented Life Project was to: Practice Gratitude; write down what you are grateful for each day this week. I'll be doing that as the week progresses but the first thing I was grateful for was that I took a Polaroid picture in our courtyard on Saturday when the sun was shining and all was well with the world. I was sitting outside having a cup of tea when I looked around and thought how wonderful it was all looking with the fresh greenery and the flowering rhododendron and the tulips.

I grabbed my Polaroid camera, took the picture and added one of the border treatments this modern day digital version of the Polaroid camera has to offer and printed it out. So when the Gratitude prompt came up later that day I was completely ready for it. I layered the picture with a piece of vintage text and sewed it on to a very suitable looking gelli plate print which I discovered in my stash.

I made it using a wide variety of leaf stencils and it went so well with the picture. I added stamping and some pieces of washi tape in a suitable colour.

The page will forever remind me of a special moment on a Saturday in May 2014 that I'm very grateful for.

Random Act of Kindness

Random Act of Kindness are known in the art trade as RAKs and they can mean all kinds of things such as sending someone a piece of mail art or an Artist Trading Card out of the blue, but of course it can also mean lots of other things such as paying for someone's groceries when they have left their purse at home, feeding someone's cat when they are away from home and I'm sure you can come up with many other ideas as can I. I try and practise them as much as I can but I mainly do so anonymously. They put a smile as much on my face as on that of the recipient but I don't like talking about it. The challenge for The Documented Life Project this week (no. 19) is to : Document a random act of kindness (by you). I'm deviating a bit as I'm documenting such an act by someone else i.e. my mother.

Out of the blue I received a big box coming from my mother in The Netherlands. In it there were two table carpets. I have long hankered after one. If you are familiar with the paintings of the 17th Century Dutch artists such as Frans Hals and Rembrandt you may have seen them.  Here is a good example. They literally are thick carpets that are meant to go on a table rather than the floor. I can remember my grandparents having one. And I've always wanted one. My mother managed to lay her hands on not just one but two and one is now adorning our dining room table while the other decorates the top of the settee. You can see it on the table in the picture above and for interest I've put my planner on top. The picture was taken with my Polaroid camera and I used that to add a border to it.

I stitched the picture to a gelli plate printed background to which I had added rubber stamping in the shape of a chandelier and decorative chairs, to create a dining room atmosphere. I coloured the stamps in with watercolour markers. I also used white and black pens to outline.