Fire and Ice

Tomorrow is my best friend’s birthday. The date also reminds me of High School (HS) as this is where we met and his birthday was only a few months after we’d started our first term in 1987 so this means that we’ve known each other for nearly 20 years! Did I really start HS nearly TWENTY years ago? But it seems so long ago... and surely I don’t look that old, right? But seriously – I loved HS and would do it all over again if I could – but of course it would never be the same. Other than loving it because that’s the place I met lots of my best friends (including Jose whose birthday is tomorrow. For the record: Happy Birthday!) I really loved the whole learning experience in those two years. Previously my educational experience was of course Primary and Secondary school, which I also loved – I guess I just love learning. But we mainly stayed in one classroom, had very strict rules about everything and the school day was tightly regimented. HS changed all that – we had different classroom...

Just over four years ago I went on the best holiday I have ever had. It has long been a dream of mine (and, curiously enough, of my husband’s too) to travel to Japan and after a few years of thinking about it, we just went ahead and booked it. It was just after 9/11, airfares were cheap and we shamelessly took advantage of this to get on a plane to the Far East. I have been fascinated with Japan for as long as I can remember. My great aunt is a fan and her house is totally decorated in Japanese style and I always loved looking at all those beautiful things. Also, I love the food – and in Mexico it’s been available far, far longer than it has here in the UK – and sometime in the late 90s I read “Memoirs of a Geisha” which actually fuelled my desire to see this amazing country. We are very lucky in that we have Japanese friends living in Japan, so they were very helpful in organizing our itinerary and also as a place to stay. We were there just under 3 weeks and we saw so much, a lot...

When I first started my stash accumulation (which actually came many years after the start of my actual scrapbooking!) I wanted to get a good selection of embellishments that I could use time and time again and quickly got hooked on brads. They look really cute when sorted in boxes, come in many colors and sizes and don’t require specialist tools to set – so they seemed ideal. For the record I also got lots of eyelets at the time but because they require hammering, I don’t use them too often at crops. But I do have a lot of eyelets too, although not as many as brads. Anyway, back to the story. I really loved brads and started buying them any chance I got. Thankfully I never got into “shaped” brads and concentrated on round and square ones (a few stars and flowers too) in mainly metallic colors. This has proved to be a good decision as I can always find a use for them – reindeer shaped red brads don’t have that versatility, I find. ; ) The thing about brads is that they come in huuuuuug...

Something that really, really irritates me is the way clerks here in the UK throw all your change, receipt, cards and anything else back to you in one disorganized pile which they place in one of your hands. I then have to spend a few seconds checking the change myself (because they never ever count it back!!), placing the receipt in the bag with the shopping, the plastic card in its place in my wallet and the change in a separate place. It’s particularly irritating when they hang on to the card even when they don’t need it anymore, just to make sure that it all is returned to you in one huge, messy pile. ARGH! I love the way Americans do it: count the change back, place the receipt in the bag for you and give you back the plastic cards separately, making sure you have enough time to put it all back away. This means that I actually spend less time at their desk because I have time to sort it all out before I walk away. Is it THAT difficult for UK businesses to implement this? It is SO ...

I hate silence. As I sit here in my office writing this, I am really aware of how quiet it all seems – just the soft sounds of keyboards tapping, a few quiet conversations, footsteps along the corridor... and it is distracting. I just can’t concentrate on anything when there is no music on! Let me go and grab my MP3 player... ah that’s better! Now with my head full of music (Barry Manilow, since you asked) I can concentrate better, focus and feel the creative juices flowing for this entry. Silence, for me, is loud and really distracts me. Music, on the other hand, has the opposite effect. So whenever I can, I scrap to music. I find that I actually produce better work when I do it to music. It isn’t always possible as it isn’t very sociable at crops to wear my earplugs and sometimes at home I’m in the dinning room scrapping and my husband might be watching TV or something, so we keep that on instead. But scrapping to music, in the words of Mr Manilow, could be magic. As I have said befo...

Have you ever tried to explain scrapbooking to someone that doesn’t? It always ends up sounding like quite a strange thing to do: stick photos and bits of paper in an album, along with some writing... or perhaps I don’t describe it very well. In any case, I don’t often talk about scrapbooking with non-scrappers – maybe because I have such a hard time trying to make it sound not-lame, maybe because I just like to keep some things to myself, maybe because I don’t need to. Also, I’m not a scrapbook evangelist at all. My work colleagues, for example, love looking through all the mini books and cards I make and somehow telling them how it all came together feels like I’m telling them all the secret tricks and it won’t seem so amazing any more. Besides, there are a lot of people out there that don’t get it and it is quite heartbreaking when they just can’t understand. So perhaps my biggest reason to keep quiet is the good ol’ fear of rejection. BUT, occasionally someone will come and ask me ...

“We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same. “(Carlos Castaneda) I found this quote a few years ago, can’t remember how, and it immediately stuck a chord with me. I think that this aptly describes how I go about with my life and what I think of myself. I am always the person saying, “What is the worst that could happen?” whenever things get stressful at work or at home. I also like to remind myself and others that I do not work for an emergency service so, if the customers get their renewal letters a few days late, it really isn’t the end of the world! Stress should only be saved for truly stressful moments, not for every day “minor crises”! At the moment I am facing unemployment but, instead of being miserable about it all, I am using this as an opportunity to maybe get on to something new or to take some time off to think about it all and decide what direction to follow. I’m almost excited about this opportunity I’ve been given! Oth...

Last weekend my little boy was a bit restless to go out and we had to entertain him for a few minutes while my DH was getting ready, so I grabbed one of my 12x12 albums and sat down with him while we looked through the photos. This kept him amused enough and gave me a chance to see one of my old albums again (I don’t do this often enough!). This particular album is nearly 3 years old and I had been scrapping “properly” for about 2 years at this point. Supplies were a little harder to get a hold of here in the UK at that point and all of that showed in my album: pages were simple, clean and using mainly stickers as embellishments. Later that evening, my curiosity aroused, I took out ALL my albums and looked at them again: as I scrap my photos in order, the pages were also in the order they were scrapped and besides providing a linear story of my family, they also do a very good job of showing what embellishments I was using at the time! For example, I found the first layout I did using ...

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about scrapbooking and how that has made my life better. For one, it means that I spend evenings now actually “doing” something as opposed to just sitting on my butt and watching TV. I mean, I still sit on my butt but there is something tangible at the end of the session (and not just a bigger butt, for those clever people out there!) It also gives me the creative outlet that I’d been missing from my life: even though I work in marketing, I rarely get the chance to create anything so this is a lovely change from my day-to-day life. Scrapbooking has also helped me meet many wonderful people: from the ladies I crop with to the ladies I chat to online both here and in the rest of the world, I have made some great friendships. When I moved to the UK I didn’t really know anyone apart from my husband and his friends, so getting my own has certainly helped make my life better. Life with no friends is not worth living, in my book! Earlier in the year I travelled...

Most kids here in the UK went back to school this week, the trees are turning orange and I need the heating on in the house: must be the fall. While I really do like those fall days when the sky is blue and the air is brisk, there is always a part of me that knows that I won’t really be feeling any warmth for the next 9 or 10 months and it makes me sad. I am a heat-loving, sun freak and have found it hard to cope with these never-ending UK winters. I guess the main reason is that I’m not used to this: back in Monterrey we have 4 seasons: the warm one, the hot one, the changeable one and the cool one. Sure, it does get cold in the winter (and can even get snow in the higher areas) but this only lasts a couple of months, max. By march at the latest we’re all back in t-shirts. I really, really miss the hot days, those endless days when the sun shines all the time, when you really feel like you’re melting in the 40-plus degree heat and when I can just sit and soak it all in. It goes withou...

I love lists and I have them everywhere – on the fridge, on my desk at work, in my wallet, in my diary... basically, I don’t feel that I’m organized until I write a list! So when I saw a thread on UKS about doing a book of me filled with lists, I immediately pounced on the idea and will certainly be using it on my BOM. One list, however, seemed fun but not quite suitable for what I want in my BOM; but it was too good an idea to pass up so I decided to include it here in my blog for all to see. So, ladies and gentlemen, here is my list of 10 favorite scrapbook manufacturers! 1. SEI Not at all surprising if you’ve seen my gallery –it’s SEI-dominated. I really, really like their older, color blocked papers but I also quite like the newer things. When I started out in this hobby, the SEI Simple Sets were my lifesaver and, I believe, have in a way influenced my scrapping style with their simple lines and modern look. 2. Die Cuts With a View (DCWV) Again, shouldn’t be surprising if you...

It was red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach and ruby and olive and violet and fawn and lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve and cream and crimson and silver and rose and azure and lemon and russet and grey and purple and white and pink and orange and red and … Recognize it? Of course – it’s from “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and one of my favourite musicals. I remember watching it for the first time and wishing I could also have a coat of many colors! I have always loved color – full on, in your face, wow that’s bright, colors. I normally dress in shades of blue and pink (like I said on previous blog) but I don’t just wear the pastels and I absolutely LOVE bright, hot pink! When I was about 15 my then-boyfriend’s grandma died and I had to go to the funeral. This was the first one I went to and had a mad panic as I didn’t have anything black to wear – not a thing. This is when I realized that I am quite happy with color and rare...