Look after those breasts!

Last week I altered a bra. Not one that didn’t fit me any more, of course, but I have a friend, Sian, who took part in the London Moon Walk to raise money for research into something dear to every woman’s heart, breast cancer. This was a 26 mile walk through the London night that began at Hyde Park and finished, for Sian, 8 hours and 32minutes later, to raise awareness of this awful disease. Thousands of women (and some men too I’m pleased to say) took part and the majority proudly sported a bra, on show, to anyone who cared to look!

A group of us had been out for the evening a few days previously and the wine was flowing as usual, when the conversation got around to Sian’s Moon Walk. I got to thinking, ‘Well, I have all that stash at home, I’m sure I could come up with something,’ and heard myself volunteering to decorate her, as yet, plain bra. Somehow I also apparently offered my house as the venue for an Anne Summers party, but that’s another story!

She dropped the bra off on Thursday evening and I got to work straight away. I pulled out an old scarf I’d been saving for that 'certain' layout, some tasselled edging a friend had given me, a length of pretty pink fibre from a swap, a huge silk rose and some Prima flowers. By the end of the evening it wasn’t looking too bad and by Friday it was complete with the finishing touch – four strategically placed flowers on the cups. Just to stop it looking too bare, you understand! I handstitched everything - well, it's one thing to pin items to a layout but brads pinning your bra to your skin? I don't think so. ( Sorry for the poor photo by the way - it was taken in haste. )


Here is Sian modelling it on the Saturday morning of the walk. She told me afterwards that she braved the first few hours without the t-shirt but by midnight it grew too cold and she was glad to put on something warmer. I don’t blame her.

There is a more serious side to this blog entry as well. One of my best friends died of undetected breast cancer nearly 3 years ago now. One minute we were happily celebrating her 50th birthday and two months later she was disabled because it had spread to the base of her brain. Paula died 5 long years later and I was privileged to be with her on the night she died. I wouldn’t wish her end on anyone. She was a funny, loud, vibrant lady and we, her friends, miss her dearly. Please remember to check yourself regularly and, please, give our link on here a click every day. You’ll find it on the right hand side of this page, it won't take more than a couple of seconds, it won’t cost you a penny and it may well help to save someone’s life – just as Sian hopes her walk in her underwear has done.

Toot, Toot - A Class Act

Way back in the mists of time a lady called Gillian posted on a thread on UK Scrappers and asked if there were any more Gillians out there in the ether. Several mad women replied and we got chatting and we formed a UKS team called The Gogs. Mind you not all of the team were Gillians, we had a fair sprinkling of other names too. People would come in and chat and wander off again and generally we had a good laugh about every subject you could imagine.

Then disaster struck, UKS crashed and our thread was lost forever. But the Gogs kept in touch and we have become firm friends through the last few years.

We have shared each others joy, pain, achievements, sadness and the trials and tribulations of everyday life, supporting each other wherever we can.
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We, like many others, had been affected by Cancer, personally, relations, friends, workmates and acquaintances. Like Cath, who ran the Race for Life in memory of her brother, we also lost loved ones and we wondered what we could do to contribute, albeit in a small way, to funding research into this devastating disease.

It was suggested that we do our best to contribute what we could each month, by selling handmade cards, selling unwanted items, sponsorship etc.

We started working toward this end in May 2005 and in March 2006 we had collected through our efforts £405. We were elated that we had managed that amount - but the following year in February 2007 we sent our second donation, a staggering £1000.

What an achievement for 13 ordinary women!!!

This year we have made £300 and look forward to sending our next donation.

Here are just some of these wonderful, totally insane women that I am proud to call my friends

Visual Balance

Continuing on with the "science" of achieving balance on a scrapbooking page, we are delving further this week into the different types of balance that can be achieved.

The term “Balance” refers to some equal distribution of visual weight, so that everything works in harmony. However, visual Imbalance is used purposefully by designers to grab attention and to create more energetic impact.

The use of “white space” (irrespective of colour) on a layout represents creating visual balance through the absence of elements. Not only can we achieve horizontal balance (using the left and right hand sides of the page), but also consider vertical balance, where the axis is divided into top and bottom. With our sense of gravity, we are accustomed to seeing more weight toward the bottom. When the main distribution of weight is higher, the image becomes more unstable and dynamic, as can be seen in "Laughter" below.

A lot depends on whether you want a symmetrical or asymmetrical design to your page. In brief – a symmetrical design is evenly distributed across the page – by folding the page in half from left to right, a mirror image could also be formed. This is good for formal layouts – "The Four Seasons of Grace" to follow is an example of a scrapbooking page with symmetrical design elements, with a bit of a twist, where I have balanced the die-cut flowers with the embroidered ones, but put the paint chips on the top right and bottom left to avoid a feeling of "top heaviness".

Asymmetrical balance occurs when several smaller items on one side are balanced by a large item on the other side, or smaller items are placed further away from the centre of the screen than larger items. One darker item may need to be balanced by several lighter items. An asymmetrical design may be more dynamic, because it appears casual and less planned. Very careful planning is required here, because it is often harder to achieve overall balance. "Annie Walters" is a clear example of this type of asymmetrical balance.

There are more interesting examples of achieving asymmetrical balance in art here, represented in classical paintings:

With the increased popularity of circles on pages, radial balance must also be considered, where all the elements have a common central focus point. In this following case, "Katrina's 40th", the photo.

This type of balance is typically associated with circles, but I have used the heart shapes here as well.

Crystallographic balance is defined by having the same visual weight over the whole page – probably a bit harder to achieve with scrapbook pages, because our intention is for the photo to form the focus on the layout. However, I guess the following example is about the closest we could achieve in scrapbooking:

(I shall replace the dodgy scan later!) All these layouts are not recent, so it just goes to prove that we are often employing design principles even when completely unaware!

Now, if it were only as easy to achieve some life balance – but that’s a different topic altogether! Why not have a go and produce something completely different from your normal style - all it takes is a little research and planning - or else - just go for it! Till next week, when we talk about the "Z" principle, and the rule of thirds.

Happy scrapping!

Ali :)

Spotlight on Karen

Karen Leahy (aka Scrapdolly)

I live in Poole with Nigel, my husband of 19 years, and with our three cats …. Well two cats and a Fiki monster! I am the head-teacher of a local school for 3 – 11 year olds, which keeps me fairly busy, but I still find plenty of time to scrap since discovering this all consuming hobby almost three years ago.
I love scrapping – it is a real creative outlet and there is no better way to wind down after a stressful day at work than putting layouts together. It has filled a real gap in my life and brings together my love of photography, my love of nature and my love of all things creative. Besides which – I am a teacher …… we LOVE cutting and sticking!
Discovering scrap-booking has opened my eyes to so many new things and I love trying out new products and techniques, although my layouts tend to be very simple. I tend to stick to scrapping rather than altered art and I have recently been scrapping 8 x 8 and 11 ½ x 8 as well as my normal 12 x 12. I love to scrap anything and everything, from the small, inconsequential daily events to recording family history and creating layouts about all things in nature. To me it is the perfect hobby.
Nigel is very supportive of my hobby, offering lots of useful advice as he is very artistic, and he always allows himself to be the butt of my jokes in humorous layouts. He has even completed a few pages himself – digital though … I am not letting him loose on my stash! As we don’t have children, the cats really are our fur babies and are such characters, especially Kira and Fiki, our two Bengals. The cats feature quite heavily in my layouts and I love trying to make ‘different’ pet pages.
Scrap-booking has enabled me to make some really special keepsake gifts and albums for family and friends. It has also opened opportunities for me to extend the enjoyment of my hobby by teaching at local crops and thus making even more scrapping friends than I have made on line. I have been proud to have been on several design teams for magazines and on the design team for the UK's largest scrapbooking forum. I have recently joined with other British Scrapbookers to form the design Collective, offering on line scrapbooking classes. I am proud to be a member of Jillybeans design team, working with the gorgeous kits she sends out and having my work showcased on her site. I also have a scrapping blog where you can see my work and read my general daily ramblings http://dollysdreamings.typepad.com/
Scrapbooking is such a wonderful and all consuming hobby and I would go so far as to say that, for me, it is more than a hobby – it is a way of life.
the page I have included is an older one but it seems to sum up me, my style and my love of scrapping. It is a picture of me looking at albums of me and my parents with a lot of smaller pictures of us at various stages in my growing up. Scrapping for me is about recording those memories we all have and about remembering the love.

Get your hankies out

Tuna and Water Chestnut Hankies.

Another cheats starter for dinner parties, 2 per guest, or if you prefer to make larger ones they make a nice supper meal.












To make 16 you will need:

2 packets of ready rolled puff pastry
1 small tin of Water Chestnuts (my Tesco have stopped doing them so I got them from Sainsbury)
1 medium tin tuna (I prefer in brine but oil is OK)
1 small chilli (optional)
1/4 pt thick white sauce
Make approx 1/4 pt of thick white sauce and allow to cool.
Drain the tuna and roughly flake
Drain and chop the water chestnuts. Roughly chopped will give a crunchier texture than finely chopped.
Finely chop the chilli
Mix these with the white sauce
Cut the pastry into 3" squares. Put a spoonful of the mix into the centre of each square and dampen all round the edges with water. Draw up opposite corners to make a parcel and press the edges together to seal.
Brush with egg yolk and bake in a hot oven 180C till golden, about 20 mins .
Serve hot

Curves in all the right places.

Digital cameras are amongst the great wonders of our time. I feel so lucky to have benefited from this amazing technology but can't help feeling sad that it came so late in my life. All you young parents are able to capture every small change in your children's lives. All the milestones. Every happy moment.

When my children were born times were harder and money tighter. Cheap cameras were plentiful but not good. Getting films developed was relatively expensive when every penny counted, and the prints were very small. They faded quickly, even out of the light. There's an old joke about rolls of film that developers enjoyed - every roll of film they saw had christmas trees at both ends and a holiday in the middle! How very true. Even now it's possible to find an old roll-film camera at a carboot sale with a film still inside it with a few frames used up but nothing else. Now, we can just click away happily away.

One thing that has changed with having this freedom is the fact that we are now the ones in control of how our pictures look and not the developer. Our cameras have very good auto-exposure metering but, just as with film cameras, can sometimes under-perform in tricky lighting situations. For the techno-challenged - exposure metering is how cameras work out how long to keep the shutter open in any given situation when switched to auto settings - the way most people use their cameras. Put simply - a bright day will need only a short exposure and dark conditions mean the shutter stays open longer.

Unfortunately I see a lot of potentially good digital photos that are underexposed, over-exposed or with lack-lustre colour. Mostly - just dark! We all make them, even top photographers can turn them out. The trick is to recognise them and either delete them or correct them. Most digi-cameras come with editing software of some sort because the manufacturers know that taking a photo is only the first step towards a quality image. Photoshop is probably the best known software - it's an awesome piece of kit but very expensive. Photoshop Elements is the simplified, cheaper version. Somewhere in-between comes Paint Shop Pro, the software that I've come to know and love over the years. It's as powerful as the full Photoshop imo but very much cheaper. There are lots of different packages out there - it's just a case of using them and getting to know them, without fear.

I use the word fear because I know that some people really are scared of editing their photos. Please don't be scared - it's fun! Your image won't self-destruct - neither will your PC. You've taken a great shot - why not give it that finishing touch? Just open your image file in the programme and play.

Here are some screen-shots where I've been brightening up a photo in Paint Shop Pro, using Curves. This is a standard tool in Photoshop too. A small tweak in Curves can brighten an image and improve the contrast in amazing ways but with good control. I could have just shown the use of Brighten/Contrast but although that's simple to use it's like using a sledge-hammer to crack a nut - no subtlety at all!

Go to Adjust > Brighten and Contrast > Curves.


Opening screen ^

Don't be put off by the fact it looks lke a mathematical graph - just think of that diagonal line as if it was a length of stretchy elastic. You just click and drag your mouse on the line, pushing and pulling it. Most tweaks will result in an S-shape to give good results. Towards the top of the line will be the brighter end, and at the bottom, the darker end. To start with you could try big movements - just to see how it works. Simply click on that curved arrow at the top of the screen to undo. Eventually you will see that just small changes in that line will greatly improve brightness, colour-saturation and contrast. I touched the line in 3 separate places to produce a subtle arc. Hopefully you can see the difference.

I just pushed the line in 3 places ^

So, I hope you can see that basic photo-editing is not difficult - or scary. You may have invested a lot of money in your camera - invest some time in your images too.

To finish, here are a couple of links. The first one is Picnik (link) - a new on-line photo-editing website. Anyone who doesn't have software might like to try it out. I can't vouch for it, and this is the beta version but it's a great idea.

The 2nd link is Photojojo (link) a really fun site that I've just discovered and subscribed to. It's full of fun things to do with our digital images and shows new ways to display them too. There's also a shop. Check out the archives if you have an hour to spare!

Keeping Diaries

I've kept diaries all of my life, ever since I was a child. I've always found it a really great way to express yourself and release emotions. Keeping diaries has really helped me to gain a better understanding of myself and how my feelings work, and I've learned a lot about myself this way. I have many different types of diaries, not only the one where I write my inner most thoughts. Some of the diaries I have go way back to my childhood and some are from my teenage years. I have diaries that my best friend and I kept together, where we would each write a little bit about what we did that day, sort of like an on-going story of our teenage life. Sometimes we just wrote down song lyrics that we related to at that time and sometimes we made up silly poems or just drew silly pictures, but I love to read this diary now that I am older. It never fails to shock me or have me in fits of laughter at the memories. I look back and can't believe how much I have changed and how different my life is now.

Other diaries I have are holiday diaries that I kept as a child. They are very basic, but I love and treasure them dearly. One of my favourite diaries is the one I kept when my family and I went on holiday to Cairns, in Queensland, Australia in 1990. We emigrated to Australia, from England, in December 1988 and had been living in Australia for one year when my mother won the holiday on a radio competition, it was for a 2 adults and 2 children to go on holiday to Cairns for one week. It was the best holiday I ever had. I collected leaflets, tickets, napkins, postcards, maps, photos and many other things and stuck them all in the diary. I am so glad I kept that diary, because now I can look back and remember all of the things we did, people we met, see all of the places we went and remember the things we saw there, some of which I would have otherwise forgotten.

I still keep diaries like this, and am in the process of finishing one from my most recent holiday to Hastings, along the East Sussex coastline of England. I also keep a personal diary and I know that in another 20 years, I will look back and see how much my life has changed and will be shocked at how far I've come. I think keeping a diary is a lovely way to put your life into perspective and to treasure all of the experiences you have in your life, good or bad. I love to pull out my old diaries when I'm having a bad day and laugh at all the funny things that have happened to me throughout my life, or see how much better my life is now than it was, which never fails to cheer me up a little.

As well as keeping diaries, I also love to read books in the style of diaries. A favourite of mine was one I read a little while ago called 'Diary of an Ordinary Woman' by Margaret Forster. It was a brilliant read and I would definately recommend it to anyone who likes to keep diaries, or enjoys this sort of book.