Scrapbook

A few months ago, after a few false starts, I decided to actively wean myself off magazines. Women's mags had gone years ago, along with any interest in fast fashion. (In fact, I think the two things went together - cutting out magazines helped win the battle against manufactured need.)

But the home ones stayed, even if only bought or borrowed intermittently.

So I tried a new tactic: creating my own. Mining my stash of magazines for the images, shapes, colours and ideas that really got my attention and putting them all in the one place.

This isn't a particularly original device. When I was an art and ceramics student I kept a visual inspiration diary of all the things that attracted my attention, keeping them alongside sketches, plans and ideas. I was writing my PhD at the time, and the visual and tactile were a good counter-balance to being in my own head much of the time.

In the years since, I've mostly worked in the world of words and ideas - I've quickly lost my visual language. Hence my passive reliance on magazine stylists' assemblages of things, rather than creating my own. I think we all need some outside inspiration, it's a matter of degree I'm speaking about here. For me, it had gone too much the other way.

Of course, I still know my inclinations for natural textures, warm woods rather than steel, organic and serpentine shapes instead of perfect geometry, the oddly handcrafted rather than the perfectly manufactured. And my favoured colours of reds, browns and greens.

But this all came home to me with more clarity and in a more immediate way when, on a sunny afternoon, my son and I sat on the front step, scissors and glue in hand, our two scrapbooks in front of us, selecting and cutting and sticking images from a swag of old magazines. Ideas of things to make, shapes and colours that have grabbed our attention. His scrapbook was chiefly filled with maps, boats, cars and kids, and lots of red and blue (his favourite colours).

Now months later, when I flip through my scrapbook, the collection of images make me strangely happy: flowers, driftwood creations, pottery, children's toys. I can see my idiom reflected back to me from its pages. It isn't just a random collection of things - there is a language of objects at work. And that language is mine.

It allows me to see these inclinations, likes and hopes in a somewhat objective way. To question what is there and why. And if it is there, should it be something I live with in my home? Would it make a difference? Should I try to close the gap between what is and what I enjoy?

One of the things I saw repeated in its pages, was something I was always planning to make, for years! And so I actually made the slipcover of a few blogs ago as a result of the scrapbook materialising a vague plan. (The slipcover has, by the way, been a fantastic washable, cheap, home-made investment.)

My next task for myself is to try to further fathom what this language is telling me. What does it say about me to me, and to others?