Inspired by: Shooting the Past

10 November 20144 December 2014 | Marsha.

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Hello and welcome! I’m here to share another Inspired by with you today!

Riikka and I challenge each other each month to create something with a particular theme or thing in mind. This theme or thing can be anything and for this Inspired by Riikka suggested the television series Shooting the Past.

Shooting the Past was first shown in 1999. I know Riikka owns a DVD of the series, which I believe is still sold online. I on the other hand found (and watched) the entire series on YouTube.

I highly recommend you watch it. The story is amazing, the actors are brilliant and I think it addresses a couple of important reminders for memory keepers and story tellers.

I must warn that this series is 15 years old… It is sloooooow. I’ve read that the reviews back then already addressed the slow pace, so rest assure that it will seem even slower now.

I also thought the photo montages looked rather poor, even for 1999… But that will make far more sense when you watch the series! Because all outdatedness aside: I still think you will enjoy watching it!

It took me some time to figure out what to do. I remember being highly inspired after watching the series for the first time, but it didn’t spur any specific ideas.

I watched the series again last week and this time I took notes. There are many things that jumped out at me the second time and I jotted them all down. Like the talk of photos of shop fronts of the fifties, which immediately made me think of this fifties video my mom found recently that features my grandparents (jump to 06:00!).

I wrote down random things like: ‘Library of Memories’, ‘photos on a clothesline’, ‘photo of my street’ and quotes like “All kinds of pictures with incredible stories attached” and ‘Ten million pictures, one story”. I also wrote down ‘Verborgen Verleden’, which is the Dutch version of Who Do You Think You Are.

I decided to rummage through my boxes of photos. I have tried to implement Stacy Julian’s ‘Library of Memories’ system in the past and although my digital photos are organized, my printed photos are not. Some of them are in binders, but the majority lives in (three) boxes…

I didn’t set out to find a heritage story to tell, but I happened to read a couple of letters from my dad earlier that week and I knew I had photos of him wearing lederhosen as a child. I found them, but as I was sorting through the photos, this pair jumped out at me:

Meet my great grandparents!

I remembered my dad telling me about his grandfather. I had a story I could scrapbook about him! I went through all my heritage photos to see what I had besides the tiny passport photo. And once I had a handful of photos, I decided that I could probably focus on one part of the story. The part about my grandmother being extremely proud of her father because he used to be a keen soccer player.

The funny thing was that once I decided to focus on the soccer story, I noticed that my dad is balancing a ball on his head in one of the group photos featuring his grandfather. Wow!!!

After watching the series for the second time, I had conducted an unsuccessful online search for a photo of the street where I currently live. The houses are from the 1930-ies and I was hoping to find an old one from our house in one of those regional online photo archives. No such luck, but whilst working on the soccer story, I remembered those photo archives and I googled the names of the soccer clubs my great grandfather supposedly played for…

And I found him!!! On two photos!!! And the photos were downloadable!!! For free… !!!

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I debated whether or not I actually wanted to scrapbook the story. To be honest: it’s kind off daunting to pair heritage photos with (modern) scrapbook paper. It would have been enough for me to blog it… I know there are more stories to tell (the one about the lederhosen for instance) and I interestingly felt I wanted to collect the stories rather than to scrapbook them. Hmmm…

But I had to have something to show for this Inspired by, so in the end I scrapbooked anyway. I made some interesting choices along the way though. I decided a 12×12 layout wasn’t spacious enough, so I chose an A4 spread. I also felt I could not use any artsy techniques. This and the fact that I tried to keep things simple, makes me feel like I stepped back in scrapbook time when I look at the result… It looks old-school!

And lastly I decided not to add a title. This spread is just one part of the story about my great grandfather and if I decide to scrapbook the rest, I want to be able to make it into a chapter in an album. Decisions, decisions!

Fortunately I don’t have to decide anything right this minute… Because it’s time to visit Riikka’s blog to see what story she has to tell!

Thanks for stopping by!

Inspired by: Versace Autumn/Winter 1998 Campaign

10 September 201410 September 2014 | Marsha.

inspired1 Can you believe it? It’s already time for a new Inspired by post!

Riikka and I challenge each other each month to create something with a particular theme or thing in mind. This theme or thing can be anything and this Inspired by is proof that if you keep your eyes open at all times, inspiration can be found where you least expect it.

There is a place I go to at least once a week, mostly two times a week, sometimes three times a week and that’s my gym…

I think my gym is pretty amazing as far as gyms go. I haven’t been to that many different gyms in my lifetime, so on the whole I guess it’s just a regular gym.

There is one thing that might be different though and that’s the changing room. Or to be more specific: the framed posters that are adorning the walls of the changing room:

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(Please forgive the grainy iPhone photo. It’s the best I could do because there is NO way I’m bringing my DSLR into a changing room…)

So I guess I had just been to the gym when Riikka and I discussed future Inspired by themes. We had already decided we wanted to do ‘something fashion’ again and because ‘Versace’ is printed on some of these posters, I knew it had to be a fashion campaign.

I didn’t know anything else about them though. I just know that no matter how many times I see these posters, I see something different each time I take the time to really look at them. They are captivating! And timeless… because I never ever could have guessed that this campaign originated from 1998, as I found out once I did a Google search.

Turns out this particular Versace Autumn/Winter campaign was photographed by Steven Meisel. I don’t know anything about fashion photography, but this is exactly what I love about Inspired by: it’s a way to find out more about stuff I’m oblivious to. I do know what I like though and my internet research helped me realize exactly what it is that I recognized in this campaign.

For one: Steven Meisel is famous… And he is known for photographing pop icons like Madonna. This means I probably must have seen his work many, many times before.

And secondly: there seems to be a lot of Medieval/Renaissance reference in the way the models are portrayed.

The thought of the Renaissance references kept lingering in my head. It made me think about how much I loved to read and learn about the Renaissance when I was in high school. And how seeing some of those paintings in real life blew me away when I visited my friend Anita in Italy in the nineties…

It occurred to me that I had never scrapbooked about this before. I had made an attempt at a mini album once, but it is sadly still in the ‘To finish’-pile. So I decided to dig it out and make a page about my visit to Florence with Anita:

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Making this page was so rewarding! I had fun trying to mimic the blue backdrop from the campaign, I chose several elements from the fashion and the props to embellish the page (old book pages, gold, sequins, pearl…) AND I got to tell a story that was missing from my scrapbooks!

Now… I’ve kept you for far too long! Go and see the awesomeness Riikka has created this time! I promise it will be good!

Thanks for stopping by!

Inspired by: Lifetime of Adventure

10 August 201410 August 2014 | Marsha.

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This summer is going by fast!!! Here I am again with the next instalment of Inspired by!

The song is part of the first solo album by Holopainen, who is also in the Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish. The album is called Music Inspired By The Life and Times of Scrooge.

Now… If you know me, you know I know very little about metal bands, symphonic or not. So I didn’t know who Tuomas Holopainen is. But although I’m quite a Disney fan, I also did not know about Don Rosa, the writer and illustrator of the graphic novel about Scrooge McDuck!

The series of books came out in the nineties and I guess I stopped paying attention to Donald Duck and his family members around 1992…

I found out one of the original graphic novels is available through my local library. I reserved it, but unfortunately it wasn’t available for me in time for this challenge. So… I had no other choice than to just stick with the song and with whatever images I could find on the internet.

The song has a fairy tale, wintery feel to it, which was weird because the weather was really sunny and hot whilst I worked on this Inspired by. The lyrics, as I understand them, are about an older person (or duck…) looking back on his/her life with all it’s trails and tribulations, about reliving memories and about counting your blessings.

The first sentences of the song go:

To be rich is

To still remember

To treasure your first dime

Now, if the internet is right… one of the stories told in the graphic novel is about how the world’s richest duck earned his first dime. And that made me think about my first job. I started to work at a local supermarket when I was 16/17 years old. I still remember being hired before I even knew what job they wanted me to do. It turned out they thought I might be of use at one of the cash registers. And I was!

I remember standing in the office and someone practising with me how to give back change. I also remember that at the very beginning I sometimes had to sell cigarettes and monitor the flower shop in a separate section of the supermarket and not liking it very much. I did like working at the cash register though and I stayed there until I left for college.

There is no photographic proof of me working there, but I do have some photos of that era. So I decided to just have some fun sketching and drawing and just tell a piece of the story. I started out with the graphic novel style boxes and went on from there…

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Each of the steps took me forever: the Ecoline backgrounds, sketching and colouring the change and the shopping cart, deciding on what to do for the lettering… Even drawing a couple of boxes proofed to be less simple than you might think. And then in the process I realized there was no way I could write on this page. I had too much to say!

I decided to make it into a title page instead. I think I still have some memorabilia somewhere that I would like to include. I also found that once I reminisced, more stories came up. So I might either type everything and add a text page next to this one or I will put a pocket page protector next to it and add the stories one by one. I can’t find the memorabilia right now, so I will postpone my decision until I have all elements in one place. I might even find a better photo to go on the page: I adhered it with non permanent adhesive, just to be sure!

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Conclusion: Even if the original inspiration piece threw me off a little bit, because of the Christmassy, wintery fairy tale feel… I really love the result! It is different than my usual stuff. My sketchings turned out way better than I had imagined beforehand. It was fun to play with Ecoline, acrylic ink, pencil, fine liners and markers. I even used some Studio Calico stamps that were still in the packaging!

I also love that I got to learn something new about Scrooge McDuck, Don Rosa and Tuomas Holopainen. I had no idea!

Now… I’m really curious what Riikka has created! Let’s have a look here!

Inspired by: Scrap365 magazine

10 July 20146 August 2020 | Marsha.

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Hello, hello!

Yes! It’s that time again! Riikka and I challenge each other each month to create something with a particular theme or thing in mind. This theme or thing can be anything and for this Inspired by Riikka and I agreed that the June/July 2014 issue of Scrap365 would be a brilliant source of inspiration!

As it happens, there’s a brand new issue coming out this Friday! So just to be clear… This is the new Aug/Sep issue:

But for this Inspired by we used this issue:

Riikka and I are both contributors for the magazine. I’ve been on the team right from the beginning. I love working for this magazine and I love reading it. There’s a great mix of styles in there and there is always something that blows my mind. Now you know I’m biased, but I think this is the best scrapbook magazine around and I’m proud to be a part of it!

My Inspired by project was a no-brainer: I’m in the middle of my summer break and although I had planned to finish ALL of my deadlines before the break… I did not. But I figured (before summer break started) that I needed something to document my summer break adventures. So… it had to be a summer break mini album.

I decided to use a Snap! album as a foundation. I’m not sure if I will keep everything in there for good, but I figured that I could always choose to bind the pages in another cover later on.

For the inner pages I cut about 15 sheets of mixed media paper to size and I thought that the Hello, hello Studio Calico scrapbook kit would provide me more than enough papers and embellishments to last me my 14 day break.

And then my summer break started…

And I played around with paint and had some fun scraplifting from the magazine…

But the summer break weather wasn’t that good…

And we ended up doing a lot of cleaning and purging…

And not doing anything particularly noteworthy…

And when we did, I didn’t have time to document…

So…

All I have to show for this Inspired by are a couple of foundation pages!

I had a lot of fun making them though! One of the things I’ve done in the past week is organize my craft supplies (again) and it was extremely satisfying to use some of those supplies in the process of creating the foundation pages.

Unfortunately I’m not allowed to publish photos of the magazine’s pages… If you have the June/July issue at hand, it might be fun to grab it and see where I got my ideas from!

I didn’t really think this through beforehand. I just started with the first article and I went on from there, skipping to fun background ideas first:

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Inspired by: Inspiration Station – Doodling by Emma Trout

Zentangle and doodling is so on trend right now. And it’s so relaxing to do! I love the way Emma combined it with scrapbooking. Her pages look fab! My doodling still needs a bit of colour, but I’m a bit hesitant because I don’t want to ruin things!

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Inspired by: On the Bright Side by Sanna Lippert

This was a step-by- tutorial. At first I thought my page looked terrible… But I just continued to follow Sanna’s directions and I had the best time creating these backgrounds. I was happy to use Nathalie Kalbach’s Stampendous stamps on these along with Distress Stains/Ink (hadn’t used them in ages!!!) and embossing powders!

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Inspired by: Stash Savvy by Birgit Koopsen

Birgit makes brown paper look sophisticated… I dug out one of my self-carved stamps to create the background paper, just like Birgit did in the article!

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Inspired by: Jazz it up with Gesso by Ali Parris

Just followed Ali’s directions and then left my pages to dry for a looong time… That’s why these are still quite bare.

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Inspired by: Viewpoint by Kristin Tweedale

I’m a big fan of Kristin, not just because of her simple scrapbooking style, but also for her choice of subjects to document. So I just had to include her! I liked the idea with the alpha’s so much that I basically scraplifted her page.

And that’s all I have to show for now… I keep all pages in the Snap! binder until I figure out where all the photos and stories are going to go:

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I plan on printing the photos next week and then finishing the mini album soon after. I have a serious habit of not finishing any vacation album if there isn’t a deadline attached, so wish me luck!

I’m beyond curious of what Riikka has created with the huge amount of inspiration that can be found in this issue of Scrap365 magazine… You can see for yourself on her blog!

Inspired by: Stroll through the hood

10 April 201412 May 2017 | Marsha.

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Hi there! I’m back again with a whole new Inspired by!

Riikka and I were both in Paris this weekend for Version Scrap 2014 and some sightseeing. I promise I will tell you more about that soon! In the meantime you can check out my Instagram feed for a visual update on what we saw and did.

We came back brimming with ideas, of course, but because this Inspired by was scheduled so close after the trip, we prepared something else ahead of time. Don’t worry: there will be an Inspired by connecting to the trip in the future! This month however, we chose to be inspired by Nathalie Kalbach’s awesome blog series ‘Stroll through the Hood’.

You must know by now that I can draw inspiration from almost everything. I also see photo opportunities everywhere. I don’t always take the actual photo because it’s not always convenient to stop (while riding a bike for instance…). So for some time now, if I get the chance, I try to walk where I need to go. Sure, it takes more time, but one of the pay offs is that it enables me to stop and take advantage of a photo opportunity when I see one!

Because I take my iPhone everywhere, I didn’t really need to stroll through the hood for this challenge. I already had more than enough photos of my neighbourhood! Most of them aren’t of buildings or people though… It seems that I’m especially attracted to the colours, textures and patterns of the hood:

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Riikka and I had agreed on using 12 photos for this challenge (I cheated a tiny bit there) and I think the brief was to write about what you like about your neighbourhood… So that’s what I did:

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It will be fun to revisit this idea sometime, because I’m sure that in a couple of years (or even months!) some of it will have changed!

As said, the journalling is about what I like about the place: that I can always find something to attract my attention, that everything is within walking distance and I also like that there is a forest nearby, even though we don’t go there very often. It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty good place to live and we don’t have plans to leave any time soon.

And now it’s time to visit Riikka’s hood… I can’t wait to see!