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

London Calling

We took a quick trip to the city last month, mainly to visit the V&A's wonderful exhibition - Quilts 1700-2010. It is a stunning and fascinating exhibition, with so much to see (and think about afterwards) and lots of inspiration for designers like me. I treated myself to the beautiful book you can see in the photo, Quilts 1700-2010 Hidden Histories, Untold Stories edited by the exhibition curator Sue Pritchard, as well as a few little sewing souvenirs to embellish my own quilts.

I always return from a trip with lots of other souvenirs, like tickets and postcards, leaflets and receipts and sometimes I make a little scrapbook to keep them in along with photos of the trip. This time I made a quick mini scrapbook with two postcards of London as the covers - just punch two holes at the left hand edge, add paper pages in between and cut to size, then tie up with ribbon.