Here it is again: your monthly dose of Inspired by!
If you haven’t seen this before: Riikka and I challenge each other each month to be Inspired by… something. That something can be anything, really… and we love to surprise ourselves and each other with the results!
I’ve had Last Resistance on high rotation ever since it came out and even though I sometimes feel our music preferences are worlds apart, I instantly knew Riikka would love it too.
Each of the songs on this album is a possible source of inspiration, but Do Berlin was the only one available through YouTube at the time we talked about this Inspired by, so that’s the track we decided to go with:
The song obviously isn’t about Berlin at all. It just comes into play as a metaphor. But the city does have a big role in the video and the Last Resistance album was recorded in Berlin, so I decided to just go with the Berlin aspect. And that made things extremely easy for me…
I’ve visited Berlin a couple of times. Last year I went there with my friend Liesbeth. She shot some amazing photographs during the trip and there is one that I particularly love of me walking in front of a remaining piece of the Berlin wall at the East Side Gallery.
And that’s all I needed to complete the challenge…
Berlin + wall + the cadence of the song reminds me of walking + me visiting Berlin over and over again =
My initial idea was to keep things grungy black and white like the video, but then I felt the photo called for a touch more colour. And as this all came together soooo easy anyway, I thought I’d try one of Riikka’s techniques for the background. It turned out really vibrant and awesome! I’m extremely happy with the result!
Riikka and I challenge each other each month to create something with a theme or thing in mind. This theme or thing can be virtually anything!
This month we actually didn’t create with something in mind… Instead we decided on creating with a couple of things in particular:
As you can see, this isn’t your average scrapbooking kit. Riikka assembled the kit from HEMA school and office supplies that I had sent her as a gift. And since I had duplicates of everything but the pencil, we were good to go!
We decided that we needed to set up some rules, like: use everything in the kit at least once. I think we said at first that we could only add two extra supplies of choice, but when we thought about it some more, we changed that into ‘minimum extra supplies’.
My initial idea was to make a mini about my two week summer break. I was thinking along the lines of a mini Riikka once created for Scrap365 magazine, using postcards. But once the summer break started it turned out that we were spending a lot of time at home. So the postcard idea went down the drain…
I thought about using memorabilia as a base for the mini too. But then I would have to create everything after the summer break and I wasn’t sure I would be able to pull that off time-wise.
And then I had this brainwave: I would create a photo book online, order it right after the summer break and then I would dress it up using the supplies in the kit!
Here’s how it turned out:
In the end I only needed the kit, a pair of scissors, an adhesive roller, StazOn Cloudy Sky ink, a grey Stabilo fine-liner and a circle punch.
The pages of the photo book have a glossy finish, so I tested pens in the back of the book before I committed to one. The fine-liner I chose didn’t do so well on the post-it notes and I decided to use the pencil for writing on those.
I cheated on one page though… The fine-liner failed me when I wrote a date on one of the stickers. The sticker was already adhered to a page and I decided to leave it. I traced the date with a black Sharpie instead. So technically I used two pens…
This was a really fun experiment! And now I desperately want to see what Riikka has created! You can go and see for yourself here!
Hello, hello! Let’s interrupt this August Break business with a brand new Inspired by!
Each month Riikka and I challenge each other to create something with a particular theme or thing in mind. This theme or thing can be virtually anything and this month we decided to watch another film: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, after the book by Patrick Süskind.
I first heard about the book long ago, but I have never read it. I finally saw the film last summer. I told Riikka about it and when she saw it air on Finnish television, she suggested it for Inspired by.
I started brainstorming before I re-watched the film. The brainstorm was about what scent I would want to capture and preserve in a perfume. I just listed every scent I have distinct memories of, from Zwitsal soap to the flower scent Harold and I smelled at Cabo da Roca in Portugal.
Some of the scents had to do with my grandparents and the idea emerged that I could ‘concoct’ an imaginary perfume of the scents that I remember from my grandparents house (which also happens to be my birthplace, so the first place I ever got to smell anything).
I also pondered about making actual perfume: I remember putting rose petals in water as a child. I think I must have done that more than once, but I remember one specific moment that was captured on photo (or so I thought).
Of course I had to research making your own perfume. I think I wasted hours and hours on the internet trying to find a way that would just call for household items and materials that I already had on hand. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a method that was inexpensive, easy to do and that also made sense.
It’s still a cool film when you watch it a second time! It’s not by far as visually inspiring as say Les Miserables was, but there are definitely plenty of layers in the story alone that can be used as some kind of jumping off point.
One visual aspect that has stuck with me is that the scenes seemed to be perfume ‘coloured’: a yellow or sometimes more amber hue for most parts and the scenes in Grasse seemed to be tinted lavender.
Of course I also saw clothes and flooring patterns, those always seem to inspire me, but I chose to let that rest this time.
Re-watching the film made me remember a couple of scents I forgot during my brainstorm and it awoke even more scent stories that I can cover in future projects.
OK, so here’s what I created with all this scented inspiration in mind:
I chose the background paper because my Oma liked floral patterns and because there was always some kind of flower arrangement in the living room. It also echoes the garden Baldini sees when he smells the perfume Grenouille has made for him.
For this second one I went to look for the photo of me brewing perfumes… Except when I found it I wasn’t exactly brewing anything in it. I’m scooping up something instead… that I know we made ourselves from home-grown herbs and berries, but it doesn’t show in the photo.
I decided to scrap it anyway, because the photo is actually taken on the last day before we moved to another part of the country, so it’s a moment worth recording.
Conclusion: I’m really, really happy with the result of this challenge!
I have lost enough in my lifetime to know that although you think people, places and things will be around forever, it is worth thinking about what you would want to preserve just in case one day they (or it) might be gone. Watching this film has reminded me of that once more.
Scents and smells are a great way to dig deeper into your memories. I’ve recorded only two of the stories that came up for me, but these are rich stories in the way that when I read the words and see the photos now, even more of the story comes up. More to tell on another layout perhaps! And as I said: I have also kept my brainstorm list for future reference.
And now I’m dying to hear what scent(s) you would want to preserve in a perfume… Just leave me a comment below!
A little over a year ago Riikka and I were What’s App-ing each other about Paris*, watching films and seeking inspiration… It led us to doing a challenge and because the process and outcome turned out so inspiring and fun, this first challenge continued into a series of challenges we call Inspired by.
I can’t believe it’s already been a year! And I can’t even begin to tell you what Inspired by means to me… Just have a look at all the projects I would never have created without it:
And that’s not all… I saw films I wouldn’t have seen if I wasn’t challenged, I connected dots that only I could connect, I worked on stuff out of my comfort zone, I dealt with personal turmoil in the process, I was reminded of stuff I had forgotten about, I used supplies I had forgotten about, I also experimented with new supplies… I learned more about Finland and Finnish culture… For heaven’s sake: it even led me to sew something from a pattern!!!
* I just happen to read this in the first Inspired by-post. I had totally forgotten about that! The weirdest, funny thing is that Paris seems to be a reoccurring theme for me in this series… Seriously: Riikka and I already know next month’s subject and I’m 99,9% sure Paris plays a role there too! Sooooo… maybe the Universe is trying to tell me something?!! I don’t know…
What I do know, is that the perfect opportunity to celebrate our one year Inspired by-anniversary revealed itself when Riikka came over from Helsinki to attend Nathalie’s and Birgit’s Art Fusion. We got to spent a day in Amsterdam prior to the event and we paid a visit to the Rijksmuseum together with Elina and Minna.
For this month’s Inspired by we agreed that we would each choose one ‘favourite’ work of art from the Rijksmuseum that day and let that inspire us to create ‘something’.
I chose this mesmerizing 18th century pastel on vellum (!) portrait by Jean-Étienne Liotard:
It really stood out to me and I love just about everything about it… The softness and the lightness, the colours, the materials, the motives, the Turkish attire, the look of the fabric, the braided hair… the folded bit in the top part of the art piece… Do you see those teeny tiny Chinese figures on the vase of pink carnations?!
It was wonderful to find out that Riikka had photographed it as well! Fortunately for you, you don’t have to settle for our crappy phone pictures: You can get a far better idea of the true beauty of this portrait at the Rijksmuseum website and if you want, you can also see some additional works of art that caught my eye during this visit to the museum here.
And here’s what I came up with:
I had a strong urge to start all over again once the page was almost finished (and I might have actually done it if I had remembered that I was staring at an image of PASTEL ON VELLUM the whole time!!!). But instead I figured I could always do another take on it some other time, just like I did last time!
Now… I desperately want to see which museum piece my partner in crime has chosen for this Inspired by and more importantly what she’s created with that work of art in mind!
Hi there! It’s June 10th, can you believe it? Not when I look out of my window, I don’t… But I hope the sun will come out later today!
Until then, I will show and tell about this month’s Inspired by. Each month Riikka and I challenge each other to create something with a particular theme or thing in mind. This theme or thing can be anything… We’ve done films, materials, art, music and this time the theme was a no-brainer for me…
Last month I went to see The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition in the Kunsthal. It was very busy, only a couple of days before the exhibition would end. Fortunately for me it was also wonderful and amazing, interesting and of course very, VERY inspiring! I highly recommend it, so go and see it if you have the chance. It’s a travelling exhibition and I just saw that it will open in Stockholm this week.
Well, when I told Riikka about the exhibition, it turned out that Jean Paul Gaultier just happens to be one of her most favourite designers… So we had no other choice than to make this month’s Inspired by all about Jean Paul Gaultier!
I took a lot of photos during the exhibition. I didn’t realize it was allowed to take photos, until I saw people carrying camera’s everywhere, even huge DSLR’s. Because the guards said nothing about it, I thought I might as well take (mostly crappy) iPhone photos myself!
I was fascinated by a lot that I saw. And it was a lot! I still can’t get over all the details in each and every one of garments! I tried to capture some of the details, which was very frustrating at times because of the dim lighting or because the mannequins were on rotating platforms…
Not as frustrating though as it would have been if I had to write everything I wanted to remember down, so I’m definitely not complaining! I remember what I tried to capture and that’s all I need for inspiration!
When it was time to create something for the challenge, I took out all kinds of fabric, lace and embellishments that reminded me of stuff I had seen at the exhibition:
A lot of this stuff has been in my stash for some time because I don’t know what to do with it. For this challenge I wanted to do a lay-out and I envisioned a dramatic page with an overdose of white-ish buttons and gold embellishments. But there had to be black and blue/denim too and maybe a touch of red… Oh and don’t forget the sequins!
As for the photos and the story, I didn’t have to think long. I wanted to use photos my brother took at a Madonna concert that we saw a couple of years ago. Some of the costumes from the Confessions tour were designed by Gaultier and there was one room at the exhibition filled with these costumes.
I started to layer all the buttons on the page… And I shoved them around… from one place on the page to another… and back again… And I had the wrong sequins…
In the end I had to admit it: I just couldn’t get it to look right! I love the dramatic look of a Gaultier dress… but I just can’t make it work on a page!!!
Maybe I tried to pull in too much or maybe it would have worked on a lighter background or maybe the composition was all wrong… When I shoved the pile of embellishments aside and I let just a few buttons and sequins come back in, this is what I got:
It’s all still there: the black, the denim, lace, buttons, sequins, pearls… Madonna… Just not as dramatic as I wanted it to be.
I mean: there is nothing really wrong with this page (It lacks a separate title, but the “Have you confessed” in the photo sort of is one). It’s just that I was so inspired and exited at the start of this challenge and now I’m disappointed that it just didn’t reflect into the result. A Gaultier inspired challenge deserved something grander than this…
OK, that’s it: I’m done with pouting over here. I really can’t wait any longer to see Riikka‘s take on this challenge! You can see it here on her blog! (Edited: I just looked… It’s spectacular!!!)
