Recycled Mini-Album–Finished at Last!

Saturday was the first anniversary of my father’s death. It seems appropriate that I completed the album that celebrates his life on that very day.

I have two photos to end the book. The first is of my dad with his newborn granddaughter, who will be the recipient of this book. The other is the very last photo that was ever taken of him, on his 90th birthday at the residential home. They put a candle on his pudding, and you can see how happy he looks. I am so glad that despite his confusion with the dementia at the end of his life, he spent his last days content and at peace, in a beautiful care home, with his family visiting when we could.

Here is the page spread with the background and borders. To create the background I stamped with a Stamp Barn swirl stamp (FLR 0211), using Versamark, and then brushing on randomly three different Perfect Pearls, in Turquoise, Forever Green and Forever Violet. You can see the semi-circular hole for the tag on the left.

The page complete. You can see the tag in place on the left, with its tag puller with the embossed flower. The reverse of this tag is the clocks tag on the previous page.

The last few pages of the book are taken up with details of its construction and embellishment, and some blank pages for my niece to add her own reminiscences and photos.

After completing the second page, I realised I’d left out several of the materials, for instance alcohol inks and inked kitchen paper. Ah well. No room for any more!

For the final “Notes” pages I cut sheets of plain white paper to shape, and distressed the edges with Black Soot distress ink, and stuck them down onto each page using soft matt gel medium. I was careful to apply this only to the back of the sheets and the surface of the actual page, and around the edges of the top surface of the sheets only, and not over the whole top surface, so that there would be a plain paper surface for my niece to write on with any pen or pencil of her choice.

The next step was to work on the borders, and I created a different one for each of the three pages, using white acrylic paint, and tidying up the edges with a waterproof black pen once the paint was dry.

The final step was to add the little cartoon that one of my dad’s medical student friends drew of him – I also used this picture in his funeral service sheet. My sister has the original.

I stuck the picture down onto the end paper at the back of the book and added some embellishment with a sepia archival pen, along with my blog address at the bottom of the page.

The end of the book! A good brush up to get rid of any traces of gel medium that had got embedded in the binding, and a final coat of acrylic wax, well buffed up, to give a nice vintage leather effect. I am particularly pleased that despite getting a bit carried away with lots of texture which added a huge amount of thickness to many of the pages, when closed, the book covers are exactly parallel – just as they should be!

Just a reminder of what the front looks like.

This has been an amazing project to work on. Every page was full of special memories of me, and I am sure that getting them all down on paper has helped my grieving process in the year following my wonderful dad’s death. Also, I have been thinking constantly about my niece who is to receive the book, and hoping that it will be a real treasure for her to keep for her lifetime, a little memorial of her grandfather. This has truly been a labour of love. Finally, it has been an adventure and exploration into the world of mixed media, and throughout, I have been learning new techniques, and stretching my skills and thinking outside the box, using all kinds of different materials. This adventure has been so much fun!

The final step will be to make a video slideshow of all the photos I took on Saturday night, of each completed page, with perhaps the addition of some work-in-progress pages. I want to keep as comprehensive a record as possible for my own benefit, as I shall feel another bereavement once this book goes to my niece – it has been such an important part of my life for the last eight months!

Before starting this book, I was working on a larger album about Dad, for my hubby and me to keep, based on the “Tattered Time” paper stack from DCWV, which had to be set aside in favour of this album. This is another project to be taken up again in the New Year and worked on as time permits – no deadline on this, and it will be fun to work on.

I hope you have enjoyed the journey.

Recycled Mini-Album Pages–Clocks

This post is about the penultimate page of the mini-album, and deals with one of my dad’s most absorbing interests.

He was a keen and expert horologist. He collected many clocks during his life, and was a skilled clock repairer. Over the years he amassed a comprehensive set of tools for this purpose, including a watchmaker’s lathe to complement his larger engineering lathe. He was always sketching on scraps of paper – ideas for repairs, clock movements, etc. This album would not be complete without some pages on his passion for clocks.

I recently acquired a gearwheels stencil, an “ArtMask” from Carabelle Studio, called “Rouages Steampunk.” Strictly speaking, it is a mask rather than a stencil, because it is the background that is cut away. I tried to make a gearwheels stencil once, with the gearwheels, rather than the background, cut out, and it all fell apart and I ended up with a fine collection of acetate gearwheels! (I am using them as masks, and for sticking onto projects, so they are not wasted.) Anyway, in this case, I wanted the actual gearwheels to be gold, and the background to remain black, so I did a bit of reverse stencilling. To do this, I first painted the whole page with metallic gold acrylic paint, and while it was still wet, I laid the mask on top and secured it top and bottom with some masking tape. I then wiped away the gold paint through the holes in the mask. To start with I used a baby wipe, but this was too wet and it spoilt the design underneath, so I had to wipe off all the gold paint and start again. A piece of kitchen paper wasn’t sufficient for paint removal, so I took a fresh baby wipe and wrapped it in kitchen paper and used that, which was better. For the second page, I dried a fresh baby wipe slightly with my heat gun, and the results were fine.

I am pleased with the metallic finish on this background.

The next step was to lay down some images as the next layer of background – a scanned image of a diagram of a clock escapement, and some photos of various clocks my dad repaired. I decided to fussy-cut the background away and lay them down so that the background would show through.

Here is the first clock page complete, with the addition of photos and embellishments, and the trademark white border. The images in this case were laid down with soft gloss gel medium, so as not to interfere with the reflective surface of the gold background. The clock face was a cut-out, which I had distressed and kept for another project – it had been in my stash for some time.

The first photo I chose was of some clock parts my dad made from scratch, to replace some worn ones in a clock he was repairing. He would always try to reproduce as faithfully as possible any clock parts he replaced, to be in keeping with the period – for instance, adding metric threads, or modern gears in an antique clock would be an anachronism, which would have offended him, not to mention reducing the value of the clock. Next to this photo is a picture of my dad’s little repair notebook, packed with his tiny, almost illegible writing! (He was a doctor, after all…) In this book he kept a record of all the repairs he carried out on people’s clocks, and could refer back to this, the next time a clock became an inpatient in the clock hospital. At the bottom is a photo of a church clock movement he repaired.

In the above detail shot of the title, you can see one of the Friendly Plastic gearwheels I made several years ago, with added gilding wax and Glossy Accents (neither of which shows up very well on this photo). This was stuck down with Pinflair glue.

The next photo shows the second clock page with the photos added. A bit more of the gold gearwheels background is left exposed in this one, but there is a fussy-cut clock movement laid over the left-hand page. On the right hand page you can see a photo of one of Dad’s antique clocks – his oldest one, a 17th century Cromwellian clock that my grandfather picked up cheap in a sale “because it’s only got one hand,” when they were made with only one hand!

With the addition of borders and some text, the page is complete. You can see the tag puller on the right – more details about the tag below.

A couple of detail shots of this page. First, the top of the page, showing the gearwheels border I created, and the blue-painted clock movement (another church clock that he repaired) overlaid.

At the bottom of the page are photos of two models of different types of clock escapement that Dad made from perspex. He used these on an overhead projector to illustrate the difference, during his lecture “The Clock Doc – or Horology in a Nutshell,” his presidential address at his local medical society. Typical of Dad, he spent many hours making these models, and they were up on the screen for only a few minutes. They are now in my possession.

Preparing to make the tag. You can see the semi-circular shape I have punched out, and the printed clock face image ready to be punched out with the same punch.

The clock face tag puller attached to the tag.

The tag in situ, showing how the tag puller fits exactly into the semi-circular hole.

Because the two pages glued together to form the tag holder came at the end of the clock section, the reverse of the tag is different. Here you can see the stamp I used – one from the Stamp Attack Butterfly Doodle Dallions set.

I used some Cosmic Shimmer Lapis Cobalt Aurora fine embossing powder to stamp the image, and then three different Perfect Pearls (Plum, Kiwi and Turquoise) applied like watercolours to colour the image. After this I punched out the shape.

To complete the tag puller, I distressed the edges with Black Soot distress ink.

Here is the reverse of the tag, with the flower tag puller attached.

This picture shows the tag in place, with the flower tag puller nesting into the semi-circular hole.

The background and border on the clock side of the tag. I used an Artistic Stamper stamp for the background (“Cogs”), stamping with Versamark, and adding some Cappuccino Perfect Pearls with a soft brush.

Here is the completed clock side of the tag, with some journaling with my white marker pen.

Here is the reverse side of the tag, completed. As this lines up with the final page of the book, I decided to make this one a summary of all my dad’s qualities and accomplishments as celebrated throughout the book.

All that remains to be done on the book now is the final double-page spread, and then a couple of pages of information about how the book was constructed and embellished. If there is room, I shall add a couple of blank pages at the back for notes and further photos.

WOYWW 287

For details of how to join in the fun, please click on the WOYWW logo in my sidebar, which will take you to our hostess Julia’s blog.

Still working hard on the recycled mini-album, which I am determined to finish by 11th December!!

You can see it lying on a scratch paper that I’ve made from the background of this page and previous work. The page I have just completed is on my dad’s interest in astronomy. You can read more detail about the creation of this page if you scroll down to my previous post, and the posts below that, which deal with other pages I’ve been working on since last week’s WOYWW, for those who are interested in following the progress of this album.

Also on the desk you can see the inevitable dirty paint water (different colour this week!), the paints I used for the background for the page, and my glass bead gel medium, which I also used on this page. Various pens, paint brushes, gel mediums, spray sealant, bubble wrap printing blocks, distress inks… the general detritus of a busy art desk lol!

Not a great deal of other news this week, apart from the fact that we’ve again been having major problems with mum and her awful behaviour… it is really stressing me out, but as always, she is behaving quite well following on from the latest row, although she did have a blip with my hubby while we were out for lunch with a friend today. She gets extremely difficult if she isn’t constantly the centre of attention.

I have been reasonably well this week, apart from a couple of evenings with a weight on my chest and palpitations as a result of said stress, and an M.E. crash on the recliner yesterday afternoon and evening. From now on, of course, there is lots going on, but as long as I finish the album in time I’m not too bothered!

I haven’t forgotten that I didn’t post about last week’s soap making class – too many other things to post about! I will try and do it together with tonight’s class.

I haven’t done much knitting this week, and am still picking up stitches around the neck. Nearly finished now! Watch this space.

My diet continues to go well, although the weight loss is pretty slow these days. I have now lost 2 stone 1 lb (29 lb) since I started back in June, and I am now officially no longer obese, but merely overweight!

Happy WOYWW everybody, and have a great creative week. Again, my apologies for not visiting as many of you as I would have liked, but not much time to be on the computer at the moment.

Recycled Mini-Album Pages–Astronomy

The second of two posts for today.

Another of my dad’s keen interests was astronomy. He owned a small telescope on a tripod and many times when I was still living at home, he would wake me to go out into the garden in the freezing cold to do some star gazing. Despite the discomfort I always enjoyed this and he showed me some interesting things. When we came in we generally made a nice warming cup of cocoa before returning to bed.

For this page I have chosen one of a series of photos he took of the transit of Venus in 2004.

First of all, the backgrounds. The image on the left-hand side is of an orrery that I found on the Internet. The right-hand background was created with acrylic paints.

First of all I painted the whole surface with a very dark blue (a mixture of Windsor blue and black) and when this was dry, I added the swirling nebula using alizarin crimson, more Windsor blue and a touch of phthalo green, all lightened with a little titanium white.

The tiny stars were created by spattering with metallic silver acrylic paint, which was also used to paint the larger stars.

Onto this background I pasted the images, using regular matt gel medium. The text was scanned from a label written by Dad, which I found in the envelope containing his transit of Venus photos. The photo at the top shows his telescope set up to observe this rare phenomenon.

For the border, I painted around the edges with black acrylic paint, and then, using my white marker pen, I drew the dots and stars, and added the text on the left-hand page. I added an arrow with a black waterproof pen, to indicate the shadow of Venus – it wasn’t really showing up sufficiently! To complete the page, I added some glass bead gel medium to the edges of the photos.

I photographed this page using a scratch paper I have created using black and blue acrylic paint, and a little silver from this page. Here is a photo of it – I am not sure if I will add anything else to it.

The other scratch paper that I’ve made, from recent pages in the mini-album, I made by arranging the colour in stripes. Most of this was from cleaning brushes, but I have also cleaned off my palette knife (particularly the black and white marks). Originally this was going to be a mostly orange scratch paper but I quite like the addition of all the other colours!

Now for some detail shots of the astronomy page. The glass bead gel medium is still not quite dry, and shows white, but this dries crystal clear.

This page completes the penultimate signature of the book.

Recycled Mini-Album Pages–Music

The first of two posts for today.

My dad was extremely musical and played many instruments – all the wind instruments apart from the clarinet and the recorder, and was also an expert keyboard player – piano, harpsichord and organ. I have decided to devote a section of the album to his music.

This is the title page.

The picture shows one of our early annual musical weekends which took place over the spring bank holiday weekend. These gatherings took place for over 50 years, beginning when I was a very small child, and we saw the next generation coming along too. Music would take place morning noon and night – very late at night, well into the small hours! Large quantities of food were consumed, and local Devon cider, and a very good time was had by all. These weekends are part of my heritage of happy memories.

The background for the page was created by laying down a Tim Holtz mask (“Concerto”) and applying white pan pastel. The photo was attached with regular matt gel medium and the text and borders were done with the white marker pen, with the addition of black permanent marker around the title. You can see that on the border, I have filled in the “raindrops” from the previous page, and added stalks to them to turn them into music notes for this page. The text gives a bit of detail about Dad’s lifelong love of music.

The second page background was created by stamping with my music background stamp (Artistic Stamper music background) without the use of an acrylic block, so that it moulded itself to the page and also left some gaps to give it a more distressed look. I stamped with Versamark and then embossed with black embossing powder.

Adding the photos, using regular matt gel medium.

The borders, text and embellishments, all done with the white marker pen, with the addition of some blue acrylic paint. Spraying with Rustoleum sealant spray completes the page. This spray is matt, which had the effect of dulling the shiny surface of the black embossing of the background, making it appear an integral part of the page.

The picture on the left is one that Dad took many years ago, of all his instruments lined up. This was taken before he started playing the bassoon. The viola was a long-standing family joke because of all his instruments, this was one he did not play well, and when he started, the room tended to empty! At the annual music gatherings, it used to come out in the small hours when the less stalwart musicians had all retired to bed, and a few intrepid musicians would generally tackle such pieces as Schubert’s string quartet “Death and the Maiden” which goes on for ages! Definitely one to separate the men from the boys.

Dad was a member of his local symphony orchestra for many years, playing in turn the flute, the oboe family, the horn, and latterly, the bassoon. He also played chamber music at every opportunity, being a member of a chamber orchestra for a number of years. There were occasional musical evenings when friends would gather to play and sing, and when I was a small child, I was often lulled to sleep by the sound of live music ascending through my bedroom floorboards. I am sure this is why I love chamber music so much. My dad’s lifelong favourite composer was J.S. Bach and when he retired he bought himself an electric organ, on which he played nothing else. He passed this love on to me.

The picture on the right hand side shows my dad playing the organ at a Christmas service at church. He was a very reluctant church organist and helped out only when there was absolutely nobody else to do it – he preferred his keyboard music to be a private affair and only felt happy performing in public on his woodwind family.

To complete the music section, I could not leave out a page about Dad’s harpsichord.

He made this instrument himself, entirely from scratch. It took him four years to do (including moving house in the middle of one of the severest winters on record in February 1963). It played extremely well and was used for many local concerts.

As a result of my dad’s passion for music, classical music has been a major part of my life, and I am very grateful for this influence.

Recycled Mini-Album Pages–More Family Photos

The final pages in the family photos section. All the photos were stuck down with regular matt gel medium.

Christmas

Here is a page dedicated to Christmas, showing my dad in fine form – he really enjoyed Christmas dinners, serving the wine, pulling crackers and wearing funny hats.

As a surgeon, he always did the carving and nobody else was allowed near it – I have never been good at carving, probably because I never had any practice! He always said the same things when beginning to carve a joint: “I’m not sure how to tackle this…” (this after many years of doing it) and “I’m not doing this very well – it’s a bit scrappy” (always perfect) and then the inevitable quote from Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Samuel Whiskers,” my absolute favourite of her books, in which naughty Tom Kitten decides to climb up the chimney to catch birds on the roof, but gets lost in amongst all the flues, and gets captured and tied up by the wicked rat Samuel Whiskers, whose wife makes him into a roly poly pudding. Stymied before she can cook this repast, SW remarks on the sootiness of the pastry, and utters the immortal words, “But I am persuaded,” (said Samuel Whiskers,) “that the string would have proved highly indigestible.” These were the words Dad always said when he cut the butcher’s string from a joint.

For the background of this page, I found a scrap of Christmas wrapping paper that was just big enough to cover both pages. It is really just brown paper, with holly leaves and berries printed on it. This was attached with regular matt gel medium. I added a few more with my white marker pen, along with the text around the photos. I quite like the border on this page, which is slightly reminiscent of the ends of crackers! It does have a touch of celebratory exuberance about it.

Family Festivals

The next page is dedicated to various family festivals, including my wedding (proud father of the bride), my niece’s 21st birthday (she is going to be the recipient of this album once it’s finished), my hubby’s 60th birthday lunch party, and my parents’ golden wedding (with my niece as a little girl, eagerly looking at the presents). These photos are obviously not in chronological order – it was just the best arrangement of the pictures to fit the page.

The addition of some doodled flowers and text, and the black and white border, completes the page. You will see how I have continued the shape of the border of the previous page.

On the right hand side in these photos you can see the edge of a photo sticking out – there are a lot of loose sheets between the final pages now, after I spent some time planning the layouts.

Holidays and Outings

The final page in this series is dedicated to holidays and outings. Obviously I couldn’t include every holiday and outing – this would require a book of its own, but this is a representative selection.

The first picture shows Dad and me on holiday in Iceland. This picture was taken by my American friend whom we met on the holiday.

Underneath is a picture of Dad on HMS Warrior in Portsmouth. We all had a lovely holiday together a few years ago in Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight.

On the right are two pictures taken on an outing to South East Cornwall. Towards the end of Dad’s life before his dementia escalated, we used to take them out for the day. He is looking very old on these pictures – he had recently had his 88th birthday. This was the last major outing we took them on.

For the background and border of this page, I decided to use a weather theme, with sunbursts, clouds and raindrops. I drew all of this with my white marker pen, and then filled in with white acrylic paint, and added some accents in pale blue acrylic paint. The raindrops form the border of the larger page that follows. Look out for what I do with them on the next page!