Sunday someplace else

Missed out a week or more but I am now back to my Sunday-someplace-else, where I highlight some site or blog that I love. This week, paper art by Helen Musselwhite:

Just the most stunning work, so detailed. Love it all – go check out her site.

Another (quick) envelope book

I made this with the idea it would be a quick, easy, limited supply project. I seem to get a lot of email, Peamail, and YouTube mail from people who want to use some of my mini-books for kids groups. This should be a good one for that, as you can easily substitute a punched hole ribbon binding. I kept it simple but you can obviously add a lot of embellishment to it.

Dinnertime, and technology is on the menu

We are so geeky sometimes. Dinnertime for us is usually early workday in California, so every so often we have dinner while watching a Twitter feed or webcast of the new Apple announcements. I think I may have mentioned in the past the fact that we have a Mac-mini in the kitchen that runs the music collection and it is hooked up to a monitor that is supposed to be mounted on the wall (but hovers on a shelf over the table at the moment) for playing music and displaying online art. DH will often come home with some device or another, plug it in and say “Hey, listen to this!” (most recently, after we had to pull out the oven to have a new one put in, and one glance behind it nearly sent us all screaming from the house, he played me a song called “The Crack Between the Cupboard and the Stove” by songwriter/balladeer Anne MacFie which described the state of it very well.)

While I strongly object to watching TV during dinner, or eating in front of the TV in general, we do it occasionally on the weekends at DDs request and that proved the thin edge of the wedge, so now my right of protest has been squashed.

There was a lot of speculation about the “major product announcement” coming and it was, as expected, the announcement of the iPad.

You can watch a video of the event announcement here.  At about 10″ and 1.5 lbs and with iPhone like touch screen action, Photo app for displaying albums and optional direct import from your camera on the go,   a built-in book reader and HD YouTube, it looks like it might be something for the Christmas list.  Of course, the cost to the UK will be probably nearly double that of the US, and the monthlly charges (which I think I heard were on the order of $30 in the US)  will be staggering.  AND they aren’t even thinking about outside the US till June.

I would  slip this baby into my crop bag – how lovely to take your “albums” (paper or digital pages, in digital format) with you to share and be able to see them a reasonable size all for under 2 lbs.  And view UKScrappers on the go without squinting.  {sigh}

As there is an App store and DH is an iPhone app developer, I imagine we will “have” to get one at some point, and DS is already asking to get his name on the “I want” list.  I love my kids, I do, really, but THIS time I am not willing to be 4th in the family n the list for a bit of new technology! THIS time, I want to be at least second!

WOYWW – very old supplies

Well, what is on my desk at the moment is….nothing! My room was in such a state that I am working on a small TV table at the moment. After a massive tidy (prompted by the discovery of some fab little 4 drawer units at Asda for £4) I am taking a moment to post. I dragged out some of my oldest supplies (Life’s Journey stuff from K&Co, Nostalgiques from Rebecca Sower, printed frames from This & That, for a start) and began a little minibook. I forgot how much I loved the vintage stuff – I must have as I have more than one of some of the items, and but oddly a fair few unopened packages!





I’ll probably blog it when I get it done, but for now, it’s just a collections of goodies.

Another little video

I pause every time I type “video” because, as those who have seen them know, they really aren’t “videos” – I will get over it eventually, or sort out my camera situation.  Anyway, for those who wanted more info on the envelope book, here is the video for you.  It goes by a bit fast in some places, and some of the subtitles may be hard to read, especially here, but if you click on the YouTube logo it should offer you the option to watch it there, a bit bigger and better quality.

It took a while to get this up due to the fact I have been really ill with some flu-y sort of nonsense and spent about 48 hours mostly sleeping and (more of a problem) for some reason Audio Swap on You Tube was down fir a couple of days.  So although the video was ready on Friday, it was only last night that I was able to add the music. Almost all of the music I use is either from my in-laws various bluegrass band recordings OR from an Audio Swap group called MusicShake.  Lots of people have mentioned that the music is restful or relaxing, which is ideal for a video like this.  Whereas I would be inclined to add some old blues boys or some raucous fiddle tunes or some other copyright protected music if I was picking stuff I like to listen to, using Audio Swap is a good way to ensure you don’t get your video silenced due to copyright. And you can limit the selections to ones that fit the timing of your video, which is handy.

I have done another one of these with a slightly different (I think easier) construction, making use of patterned paper cut to simple standardized sizes that I think turned out kinda cute.  I’ll try to sort that out, photos and video, soonish.  I need to get well and get to Staples to find some envelopes (maybe white, with no self-seal) to play with.  I have to say I  find the combo of cheap office supplies (especially now they have so much in “Kraft” or buff colour) with pretty scrappy paper to be a winning combo.  It def. helps me use up my stash, esp. from kits where I may have only a couple of sheets of paper in a range and need to make it stretch.

Will I ever….

… stop making mini-books? I doubt it. I love figuring out a new method for construction. I had bought a pack of C5 envelopes a month or so back, with the idea of making one thing, and instead I made this mini-book.

I keep getting asked by people from the UK who have seen my PBBs where I find paper bags in the UK. I hate to have to tell them that I grab a couple of huge bags of the from Target when I go back to the US for pennies. So I wanted to come up with something that was a bit PBB-like, and this is, in that it makes use of the pockets in the envelopes a bit like you make use of the opening in the bags. But it’s a bit more….precise, I guess, because the bags tend to be crinkled or have bits folded over, and somehow the bags all seem to be all slightly different sizes. The envelopes seem to be very much the same.

I really like the shaped flaps and found it went together pretty easily. I may have to have a play with the BIA cause I think I have an idea of how to punch the holes as I go but I’m just not sure.

I used these:

I’ll probably have a slide show eventually but Audio Swap is down and that s what I tend to use for my “music”

W was OYWW

Missed it again. I was so focused on sorting out my PBB that I completely forgot to add my WOYWW photo. And now that I have cleaned up, it’ll have to be “What were you working on Wednesday” instead.

Hands up if you take a class and, love the project or not, if you don’t finish it in the class (or at the very least at the crop or event) it languishes in your crop bag/room forever? I am still coming across stuff from crops 3 or 4 years ago, but now when I do I try to drag them out and assess “Are they worth completing?” and if so make it a priority.

I took a class with Bev Fletcher of Banana Frog eons ago (honestly I am ashamed at how long ago it was!) and loved the project, made a good start on it, and then got well and truly sidetracked. The project was a mini-book, using the Rouge de Garance papers and I loved the way we made the pages (with rounded corners and flaps on some) and loved the stamps (a font, TEEN) and loved what I was doing with the kit – making a mini book for DD with photos of her various “collections” of toys.  I managed to get quite a few photos after the fact, and worked on the book at a GoGo Getaway a few months later, then it got stuffed in a bag and not looked at again for another 6 months.

Well, I’ve dragged it out and completed a few more pages, and have a few more photos of current favourite things to take, but I am determined to complete it. DD saw it on my desk yesterday and already has had some input for me on what needs to get photographed! But comments from kids on what is OMW (“on my workdesk”) as they walk by is a post for another day LOL!




Anyway, here is a look at the completed pages so far – there are quite a few, but the big book rings mean I can fit a ton more.  I figure it will be a nice memento of toys gone by in later years.

Another Paper Bag Book YouTube slideshow

It seems the Audio Swap process is in progress, or the audio is messed up at the moment, but hopefully it will sort itself out soon. Until then, watch in silence LOL! It annoys me that you can’t initially set the preview frame of your video – every time it displays the most uninteresting page of the video as the thumbnail and you can change it but can only select from three YouTube offers, often none of them the one *I* would have chosen. Anyway, hopefully it makes sense – judicious use of the PAUSE button will help if the measurements go by too fast!


If you click the YouTube logo I think you can see it there instead of in the blog and that is higher quality.

Back to scrapping

A while ago I made a number of paper bag books that were different in layout and construction than the usual ones. A couple have been featured here, some I have done YouTube slide shows for detailing the construction. I’m coming down to the last few and this week I finished off one hat has been sitting in a bag with all the goodies for it for…shamefully long. I bought a very bright and colourful scrapbook kit at Costo in the USA for about $11 – it included loads of paper, stickers, punch out letters, chipboard, tags AND an album. I made the book months ago:

The BIA worked a treat – I think I would always use it on PBBs in the future! – and unlike some of the books this one makes use of the pockets (surely the single BEST reason to make a PBB as opposed to any other sort of mini-book!)

A bit more info on the construction:

And finally a glimpse of it with photos – I’m trying to find the time to do a slide show but it’s always harder once you’ve completed the book – I try to take photos as I go but then I get into a frenzy of crafting and forget LOL!

A blast from my past and some thoughts on t’internet

Many moons ago, in what seems like a previous life, there were people I “followed” – William Gibson, who wrote Neuromancer, Neil Stephenson, who wrote Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon , and Jaron Lanier (pictured above), who is accepted as the father of virtual reality.  Others in the cyberpunk movement popped on to my radar and dropped off, but these three seemed to pop up again and again.  This was both linked to my job at the time and to a personal interest, sparked by my nerdy DH, in computing and the development of the internet, way back before the days of the URL and easy www access.  Although I have read most of what Gibson has written since, I hadn’t thought of these guys in a while (well, since Gibson’s last book, anyway.)  Imagine my surprise to see a familiar blond dreadlocked face peering out at me from my Sunday Times!  Jaron Lanier, it seems, has become disillusioned with the internet.



“History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on auto­pilot,” he wrote. “Nasty hive-mind outbursts have been flavoured maoist, fascist and religious, and these are only a small sampling. I don’t see why there couldn’t be future social disasters that appear suddenly under the cover of technological utopianism.” There are many grim cases of people driven to despair and even suicide by bullying on social-networking sites. Lanier cites the case of the South Korean actress Choi Jin-Sil, who was hounded by “trolls” — anonymous online abusers.”



Following on from that:



“he regards with horror the sheer brutality and frivolity that have emerged on the net. “Anonymous blog comments,” he writes in his book, “vapid video pranks and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but, as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.”


As someone who runs a large internet site I find his comments particularly thought-provoking, and I find myself agreeing with what I read and wanting to read more.

It sounds to me that his new book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, may have some interesting things to say and is on my “to read” list.