Post-travel balance

Last week was our much anticipated and planned-for family trip to attend DCI and watch D's performance in his almuni corps..  It was not what I would call a "family vacation", in that D had rehearsals or performances scheduled for the entire week, and as a family we only spent about 24 hours together without a performance schedule.  However, while D was busy with his schedule, G and I filled our time with museums, concerts, Broadway shows, and other tourist attractions.

I dubbed it the "Magical Mid-western Music and Cultural Tour".  G's friends made us t-shirts.  It was awesome.

As with any trip, the time leading up to departure was filled with prep work, which diminished any hope of fun project time.  Throughout the prep and during travel, however, my mind's wheels were ever-turning with new ideas on projects, and perhaps more importantly... organizing my thoughts for the projects I already want to do.

Some are travel related, and I would consider to be extremely long-term projects that I have longed to have come to fruition.  

After contemplating my extensive smashed penny collection (which dates back to my early childhood) I've now come up with a display plan: create a silhouette of a state as a background, mount the pennies from that state on the background, and frame.  (alternately I could paint the state on a canvas and adhere the pennies, but I'm not sure how well they would stick)  

For my pin collection... stamp various travel stamps onto canvas, decoupage/paint over the stamps with sepia-toned paper/paint (to diffuse the sharp stamps and give the canvas an aged look) and pin the pins to the canvas, perhaps grouped by geographical location.

The idea of geographic groupings is beneficial in two ways.  A: it gives the display a sense of how much time or how many visits I've had to a particular location.  B: it makes it easier for me to check the collection over before I go to visit that place again, to avoid duplicates (this is more of an issue with the pennies than the pins, but helps in both cases)

I also have a patch collection, which will likely end up being on some kind of quilted wall hanging, but I don't have a particularly clear vision of how I want to do that, so the wheels are still turning (though I'm making notes)

I've also worked up an idea that is a grand surprise for D and a few of his friends... not that I have a wide audience but I will keep it under wraps until it is complete and presented. But I am incredibly excited about this project and it will probably jump ahead in my project queue.

While the beginning of our trip was packed with activities and events, the latter days had a lot of "hurry up and wait" moments.  I took advantage of these long pauses in activity to begin to organize my thoughts for all these project ideas - including projects I've already started - and I've listed them out in a document that is accessible through my computer and my phone.  I've had too many days where I've had some blocks of time to work on something only to draw a blank as to where to place my energies... and then by the time I go to bed an idea comes to me and I think "Oh shoot, I could have gotten that one thing done!"  I'm hoping an updated list will help avoid those lost opportunities.

I've also implemented lists for household projects... I dub these "need to do's" (as opposed to my projects "want to do's")  I've often found myself so easily consumed by the need to do's that, by the end of the day, I have no time for want to do's, because I feel like if I don't do the need to do's now, I'll forget to do them later.  By writing them out, though, I can read them all over, decide which ones *really* need to be done now, and assign the others to a waiting list... giving me a little more balance with my time to fit in some want to do's.  As I complete my typical post-trip need to do's (laundry, unpacking, etc...) I'm lining myself up to jump right into my want to do's.  Fingers are crossed that this blog will showcase great leaps of activities in the coming weeks.

Scrapbooking and Pinhole

When it comes to hard copy scrapbooking, I work in stages.  I spread out my images or ephemera, figure out the background color for the pages, then start to poke at the layout, add in decorative elements, make a note for the journaling, then stack the finished pages in a 12x12 holder.  At some future point I will sit down and have one long gluing session for all the finished pages, and that part of the project is relatively portable in case I want to emerge from the art room and glue pages while watching a movie in the other room.  

One of the challenges I face when walking away from my hard copy scrapbooking for too long is that it is sometimes difficult to remember where I left off, or what my intentions had been with the pages I was making.  This is made especially difficult if I've scooted the unfinished pages to the side to use my table space for some other quick project (birthday cards, plant markers, mouse ears... )  It is because of this that I tend to let the scrapbooking sit for long periods of time... because even if I could steal 10 minutes for the art room, my work space is usually so disheveled that it would take me 30 minutes just to figure out what I could spend my 10 minutes doing.

Over the past couple weeks, though, I managed to take enough time out to re-organize my work space and remind myself where I was (by laying out all my "finished - not glued" pages) and where I was headed with this album.  

Post-it notes are helpful, as my mind gets scattered in between project times.

So, headway has been made in layouts, and I now have a larger stack of pages-to-be-glued in the 2004 ephemera album.

My other challenge is that I'm still trying to *only* use the paper and supplies that I already have, which is at once limiting and liberating.  Limiting because I know that manufacturers are constantly putting out amazing and adorable page accompaniments; liberating because I'm not spending hours meandering craft stores looking for adorable and amazing page chachkies.  At any rate, I really want my ephemera collection to speak for itself and to be the decorations surrounding the photos to complete the story.

I had a pinhole outing which, at the time was quite satisfying... I felt very self-congratulatory that I'd simplified my process and enjoyed the experience of slowing down my compositions, calculating the exposures, and being "in the moment".  Then I went to drop my film off at the lab and it was finally brought to my attention that I'd exposed two rolls of color negative film, not the two rolls of color slide film that I had calculated for.  With all the effort I'd been trying to put into my process, this was a seriously ridiculous bit of oversight.  The wrappers for the film are not even the slightest bit similar (Kodak is bright yellow all over, Velvia is silver and blue)  I chalk it up to having not regularly used slide film in well over a decade, also that other than the two rolls I shot in May, I had not ever used 120 sized slide film at all.  So the wrapper alone didn't trigger any realization of the film type other than "this is not Ilford, so this is color".  I just didn't bother to read the film label and ran on the assumption that the only color film I had was slide film, forgetting that I'd tossed the last of my Kodak color negative film in my camera bag along with the B&W.

Thankfully the exposures were not horribly off... I basically exposed for the film speed, but without the proper correction for reciprocity failure, so everything is a little underexposed (outside of my 5 second exposure, which was close enough to correct).  And some of the images were experimental anyway... I'm rather happy with how this abstract came out:

I set up the tripod on the deck of the ferry on our ride from Kingston to Edmonds.  There are actually small boats on the water in this shot, but the action blurs them.  The San Juan Islands are the blur on the horizon.

After still contemplating my 2018 calendar, I ran a quick unscientific poll online to see how people might feel about a calendar with a mix of B&W and color images, and the unanimous answer was "Do it!  That would not be weird at all!" I also have more pinhole images than I had realized, because I'd forgotten that I filed my scans from my vacation with my vacation photos on my hard drive, not with the rest of my film scans.  I need to make a final decision on how I want to organize my files... either keep all the scans in the film folder and make a note in the vacation folder that there are also photos on film, or vice-versa.  I haven't decided which way makes more sense, but consistency might help me to feel less scattered.

My goal is to get a few more good pinhole outings in before the end of the summer.  The challenge is finding someone who has enough patience to hang around while I make long exposures.  While I have no problem with the idea of going out by myself, it is probably not the safest choice for me to wander down distant hiking trails lugging camera gear all alone.