Seaside Memory-Keeping

The seaside has always been a very special place for me, since my childhood days. Seaside holidays to traditional resorts or remote and magical coastlines are something I've always loved.

A few years ago I discovered the inspiring memory-keeping craft of scrapbooking and it became a craze for me, an obsession for quite a while. I found old family photos and made scrapbook pages and mini scrapbooks with them, and chose pictures of my daughters to turn into little books about them. I created little books about meeting my husband, about my earliest childhood memories and family history. It was a thrilling creative time for me.

These little books are some I made to store my seaside memories. It's lovely to think that tucked inside these little covers along with treasured photos are words and ephemera to recall those times, small things to capture the often fleeting moments.

I now use all the scrapbook techniques I learnt then in my paper crafts projects for books and magazines, and I still make pages for my continuing family scrapbook. The picture below shows

the memory book cover I designed for a magazine project earlier this year.

How do you keep your memories? x

First Vintage China I Ever Bought

This little blue and white creamer is the first piece of vintage china I ever bought. It was in the Seventies and I was an art student in Manchester. I found the little jug (I didn't know it was a creamer then) in a junk shop near college, where (not very attractive) old furniture used to spill out onto the pavement. Sometimes they had records and paperback books we were interested in.

But one day I saw this little jug and bought it for few pence. It was roughly wrapped in a piece of the Manchester Evening News and I took it back to my room in the student house I shared with several others. There it joined the art materials, books, patchwork fabrics, records, clothes and general muddle I lived in at the time. It was the beginning of years of collecting vintage pieces - and I still have it with me today. It moved from flat to cottage and from house to house with me. In the Eighties I painted it for a book illustration, with cornflowers, buttercups and wild roses.

Today I've taken it out of the cupboard and filled it with a posy of clove-scented carnations or pinks, and a few other little garden flowers. It's a wonderful little bit of china for displaying posies and the memories it holds will always keep me especially fond of it.

Memory Keeping

Now that I've started my own blog I realise what is so special about blogging. It makes you mindful of all the little things you look at and have around you, it gives you a reason to record them both for yourself and others to enjoy. So the sweet flowers in a jug, the beautiful berries in a bowl, the one gorgeous rose in a thrifted tea cup all have a new significance and meaning. It raises your awareness of all the interest and beauty around you which I thought, as a designer I was fully aware of already, but this has made me enjoy everything more.

I loved reading other people's blogs for a long time, and I love that each person's is different as their own character shines through. I wanted to share my love of crafts with others, and to have a place to add my own visual thoughts, but I'm truly surprised how it has enriched my view of my little world and the things that surround me. How it heightens the beauty I see each day as I take photos. Amazing.