Can it really be September?

We had such a lovely day yesterday with friends from Arizona, with whom we spent a fun Independence Day last year that the change in the month passed me by.  We’re enjoying the fine weather, don’t have a new term to worry about (or look forward to) and though I’m gently easing back into work mode, really, the summer goes on.

There’s an abundance of fruit in the garden and thanks to Sue and Ivars’ restraint during Sunday lunch yesterday, there’s an abundance of puddings in the fridge too.

Yes, of course one of them is a plum crumble.  Good things happen in September!

Last week, prompted by an email from Shimelle about her annual “Learn Something New Every Day” project, I began to think how I might approach it this year.  I try to do something different each year – last year I had fun getting my hands dirty, in 2011 I made an envelope book and enjoyed playing with both glue stick and my computer, because previously, I’d found that though it was fun to use my computer to do these things, I missed playing around with glue and scissors.

How shall I do it this year, then?

I decided to use September to explore something I’ve seen but not really tried myself: Instagram.  I’ve signed up and logged in on my phone and also downloaded Rhonna Farrer’s app with the intention of learning to edit photos using my phone this year.  Yesterday, the first of the month, I took a photograph of the lovely sunset from our window using my phone.  I then tried my first edit by adding some text to it, saving in Day One.

I haven’t yet decided if I’ll eventually print them all out or leave them in a digital album, but I aim to learn something new each day by exploring the hundreds of options available in the Rhonna Designs app.  I haven’t decided yet if I want to post each one to Instagram, either, since this might be as public as I want to go for now.  We’ll see.

One thing is for sure.  I have a lot to learn!

Mapping out my morning

I often think that we have few secrets these days.  That we’d have to try quite hard to cover our tracks and do anything without someone else noticing.  These days, when I go to take a look at the Pinterest pages I’m following, I frequently note that one of my friends is working on a specific theme – Nita researching birds or insects, Helen is being inspired by costume of a particular period, perhaps.  (Jordi is always inspired by food and drink, I know ;-)

If my friends are making similar observations then, they won’t be surprised to discover that I’m working on a map project, working through an online class with the author of one of my favourite blogs, Pret a Voyager.  We are a bit of a mappish family here and it was funny to find many of the books on the resource list already on our shelves.  I also did what I advise my students never to do – to come to class with a clear idea of their finished project in mind…

Anyway, today’s task was to draw a hand-drawn map of something – anything – and not think too much about it, not care too much about neatness, perfection or anything I’d usually be bugging myself about.  The end result was this

I went to Cirencester, to the hairdressers, but sadly my stylist had just had one of those phone calls which leave you chilled…a family member had been taken ill.  So, a hastily rearranged date left me in town with a few errands to run and an extra hour to do them in.

Except that shops don’t open until what I consider to be mid-morning!

I had a coffee, mooched about a bit, bought bread and lingered rather longer in the tiny department store before heading towards the art shop for some paint.  I stopped to take a photograph on the way:

Please, don’t get me wrong.  I am as appalled by the murder of the young soldier in Woolwich as anyone.  But I wondered about the motivation of people in Cirencester to buy flowers to place on the war memorial.  Not that I thought it wrong…it’s just one of those things which seems to becoming the thing to do in some circles.  Which, in the words of one of our friends, I find “curious”.

Anyway, I continued to run errands and had to retrace steps here and there because I’d either forgotten something or had to wait for somewhere to open.  I stopped to chat to a WI friend and then, just as I got back to my car, remembered I was supposed to pick up some fabric for another.  And then I needed to go to the bank!   I just remembered, too, that I filled the car with petrol on the way home,  and experienced difficulty with the filler cap.  That meant I had to make a quick stop at the garage, as well.

One morning, gone!

When prompted to draw a quick map of something then, I chose to record my route in the town, noting the stopping places and the shops I visited. Strange how, if you’d asked me beforehand how I’d spent three hours this morning, I’d have forgotten much of the detail, but the process of drawing it out brought all the information to the surface again. My hero surely wondered how I could possibly spend a morning doing nothing very much. Well, here is my evidence! The map was a great way to prompt the details which made the journey.  It’s not a work of art – and was never meant to be – but as an explanation of where the time went, I think it serves its purpose.

As for the final project, well, it’s going to be difficult to share.  Visitors always have difficulty finding us and so I plan to create a map to have on hand, hopefully, one they will want to keep!  However, since I don’t really want the whole of the internet beating a path to my door, it won’t be showing up anywhere around here!  But there will be other projects to share, for sure. I am  incubating travel journal ideas based on maps, which seems rather logical, doesn’t it?

I wonder how long before the Turkish Map Fold shows up?  ;-)

Loose ends

I've bought a few of these Moleskine Messages notebooks recently, thinking that they'd make a great idea for a small gift, or replace the traditional postcard.  I'd taken one of them to Stockholm with me, thinking that it might be the ideal journal for this short jaunt.

I even scribbled in one over lunch in the middle of the cherry blossom last Tuesday.  But, time was short and I never got round to adding any colour, ephemera or anything else.

Shortly afterwards,  browsing the books in the NK store, I came across this one and my mind began to work.  I took more photographs than usual, thinking that I might have a go at a kind of collage, inspired by those in the book,

Well, of course, mine would be created digitally, rather than with scissors and glue.

Anyway, I've been tying up those loose ends, gathering the ephemera and sorting through the photographs.  I began by opening the individual photographs and editing a large collage in Photoshop but soon thought better of that and allowed Picasa to do it automatically for me!

My mind works slowly, so it wasn't until today that I hit upon the idea of creating my own "messages" style journal, drawing the design in my Silhouette software and cutting the shape with the machine.  In no time at all, it was done and I could enjoy the fun bit of filling it up with all the bits and pieces.

Rather than glue the photograph collages into the book, I printed them out as pages to include in the book.  I'd already sized them to Moleskine proportions.

I'm always aware of these events being recorded in so many different ways - I blog, there's the photographic record in Picasa, there's my Project Life pages, my scribblings in my notebook and now, there's a little journal as well!  So, I try to record different things in each, but it's inevitable that I end up repeating myself.  And in a short trip such as this, there are only a handful of themes: in this case, the journey and hotel, the food, the city, the ABBA museum and the Vasa.  Oh, and a bit of shopping ;-)

I didn't intend to post this one to anyone, but thought the flaps were a great way of keeping everything contained.  After all, when I cram lots of stuff into a few small pages, there's sometimes a danger of some of it coming adrift.

I used my sewing machine to stitch the pages together and then glued in the cuttings or used a bit of washi tape to create an extra page or two from them.

Yes, of course there's a map, showing off the fact that I can still do the Turkish Map Fold and there are a few strips of my favourite Moomin washi tape which I bought in Osaka, but hadn't found a place to use it until now.

I had a cherry blossom sticker which I thought I'd use (even though it doesn't really fit) and wrapped a yellow ribbon around to keep the whole thing closed.  I packs up quite neatly and is all comfortably enclosed.

I'm really pleased with the end result and will add it to my repertoire of journal designs for using in a variety of situation.

It's fun to sort through the bits and pieces from our little jaunt, but even better, to step outside into the garden here at home and discover that Stockholm doesn't have the monopoly on beautiful blossom.  The apple tree in the garden here is looking lovely this weekend, and if I can manage to step outside in the five minutes between the torrential rain and hail showers, I might even manage to capture the blue sky too!

Taking note

I’m a scribbler.  If I am to remember anything, then I need to write it down, and though I’ve tried writing notes on my ipad and on my phone, actually I prefer to write on paper. 

Like many scribblers, I’ve got distinct preferences as far as the paper and writing implement is concerned.  My absolute preference is for the small Semikolon notebooks which are rather hard to find but worth tracking down for the beautiful paper quality and the small details which enable them to withstand a few months in my handbag.  At a pinch, I’ll take a small Moleskine Volant, for no other reason than the fact that they are readily available and I like the coloured covers.  The paper quality leaves a bit to be desired, but since my preferred writing tool is a conventional pencil, that’s not a major issue.  I have a collection of ordinary pencils in my bag which I usually keep sharpened, though I did encounter difficulties in the office recently when trying to find a pencil sharpener because it would seem that I’m the only one who uses such intermediate technology.  Eventually, a colleague did produce an amazing battery operated sharpener which others claimed could eat pencils by the inch.  Regrettably, on that occasion, my pencil proved too much for it and I could only offer humble apologies and a replacement!

Anyway, whilst perusing the Amazon recommendations just before we left on holiday, I came across these Moleskine notebooks which are designed to use with Evernote.  I’d come across something similar last time we were in Japan and gave it and another, similar app a whirl but since both were native Japanese products, using them presented more of a challenge than I needed.  So, seeing this new Moleskine concept, I threw all my prejudice to the wind and ordered the notebook to try.

Around the same time, I read about this.  All of this seemed to be leading me down the same pathway.  Perhaps it was time to look at a means of developing my note-taking methods, making them more effective and then digitising them?  What’s to lose?

I’ve spent the last few days reading the book which backs up my experience that in writing something down, the process of learning/remembering is reinforced and actually takes that one step further by suggesting that recording thoughts visually as well as verbally makes that learning still more effective.  I draw in my notebooks anyway, not really because it helps me remember, but rather that it’s quicker to draw something than it is to describe it; for me anyway. Actually, looking at a page from my most recent notebook, I realised that perhaps I’ve been “sketchnoting” for sometime – not that I called it that, of course.

Stream of consciousness stuff this morning then, to fill that scary first page in the book.  Taking the advice of the Sketchnote author to use an indelible pen rather than a pencil (and thinking it would digitise more effectively, too) I put my trusty pencil to one side and picked up one of my drawing pens.

Looks like Moleskine books haven’t changed, then.

But it does look as though the Evernote app doesn’t worry too much about that – the above image was recorded with my ipad and the page has recorded just fine.

So, the jury’s out.  The Sketchnote handbook suggests watching a TED video and sketchnoting it as practice, which I might do later.  In the meantime, there are plenty of fine sketchnote examples here which will either inspire me or put me off completely. 

We’ll see.

The Journal

Now I’m home, I’m steadily going through the ephemera and gathering my journal and “project life” pages together.  I thought it might be useful to review how the pocket journal held up to the trip and how I managed to keep my daily journalling going.

The pocket journal itself remained on my desk in our suite and I simply put a few journalling cards in my pocket each day to scribble on as and when I felt like it.  when I returned at the end of the tour, I’d tuck the cards in the appropriate pocket, along with any other ephemera I had collected.  Anything that I wanted to keep but which didn’t seem to fit in the pocket, I put in the small concertina file I’d taken along with me, too.

But somewhere around half way through, disaster struck.  The quantity of stuff that I was collecting caused the flimsy acetate binding to tear and I needed to do a running repair with some washi tape – itself not the strongest of media.  But it held out ok and I simply took care with it for the rest of the trip.

By the time I got home, I had a very full book and I realised that I hadn’t allowed enough “breathing space” on the spine.  I ought to have been a little more generous with those measurements.

The other design issue was as a result of cutting it out with the Silhouette.  The “scored line” is actually a perforated line, and you know what happens to perforated lines, don’t you?

Another lesson learned, though most of the book had withstood the journey fairly well.

First job was to cut the binding string and remove the acetate spine.

I reinforced the torn pages inside and added another layer of paper to create a stronger construction.

I then taped the sections together more securely – I think it was unreasonable to expect a piece of flimsy acetate to hold it all together with hindsight and this time, I chose some Japanese adhesive fabric tape – bought in Japan, needless to say ;-)

When I’d done, it looked a bit like medical sticking plaster which rather amused me. Had I been able to get a better colour, then it might have looked more artful, but hey, sometimes an elastoplast/band aid is exactly what’s needed, isn’t it?

It was holding together much better so I replaced the stitching using the same red and white butchers string.

I wasn’t sure whether to cover this up at this stage

or to leave the spine stitching exposed.

I decided to leave it open and cut the paper (almost!) flush.

I added a title and finished the cover off and it’s done.

It’s now sitting on my shelf with the other travel journals.  I think soon, it will be time for a bigger shelf, don’t you?